Your Kindle Notes For:
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
Barack Obama
Last accessed on Monday March 28, 2011
35 Highlight(s) | 1 Note(s)
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as Faulkner reminds us, the past is never dead and buried—it isn’t even past.
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But also because the underlying struggle—between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together, and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us—is the struggle set forth, on a miniature scale, in this book.
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the path is for them
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between humiliation and untrammeled fury, how easily they slip into violence and
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despair.
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withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage,
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doubt art’s redemptive power,
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“That’s the only way to cure an illness, right? Diagnose it.”
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full of dime store advice….
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I ran three miles a day and fasted on Sundays.
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I applied myself to my studies and started keeping a journal of daily reflections and very bad poetry.
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free to choose a motif around which to organize my life,
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were carrying on their dirty deeds.
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my choices were never truly mine alone—and that that is how it should be, that to assert otherwise is to chase after a sorry sort of freedom.
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Communities had to be created, fought for, tended like gardens.
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borrowing other people’s memories.
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In this way I tried to take possession of the city, make it my own. Yet another sort of magic.
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in politics, like religion, power lay in certainty—and that one man’s certainty always threatened another’s.
Note:cf. Hamlets of the world
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land of dollars?
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root out: one more feeder of fantasy, one
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more mask for hypocrisy, one more excuse for inaction.
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race-baiting
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could make up for a host of limitations.
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in all the messy, contradictory details of our experience.
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living my entire life as a foreigner,
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I was the one who knew how to live as an outsider.”
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always asserting a self-reliance that I recognized as a learned response—my own response to uncertainty.
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The fantasy of my father had at least kept me from despair. Now he was dead, truly. He could no longer tell me how to live.
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prisoner of fate.
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they’ve shut off something inside.”
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the closest thing to freedom would still involve escape, emotional if not physical, away from ourselves, away from what we knew, flight into the outer reaches
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life was too hard to judge each other’s choices, too messy to live according to abstract ideals.
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potholes yawned
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on this earth one place is not so different from another—the knowledge that one moment carries within it all that’s gone on before.
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dust-bowl farmers loading up their trucks with the remains of shattered lives.
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