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Quotations (38)

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“Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result.” - p. 43
“Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?” - p. 118
“For me, becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self. The journey doesn’t end.” - p. 419
Many quotes in goodreads already, likely includes many below: I’ve wanted to ask my detractors which part of that phrase matters to them the most — is it “angry” or “black” or “woman”? === Your story is what you have, what you will always…
If you’d had a head start at home, you were rewarded for it at school, deemed “bright” or “gifted,” which in turn only compounded your confidence. The advantages aggregated quickly. === Kids found one another based not on the color of…
For the next nine years, knowing that I’d earned it, I made myself a fat peanut butter and jelly sandwich for breakfast each morning and consumed not a single egg. === My grandfather, born in 1912, was the grandson of slaves, the son of a…
Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result. It’s vulnerability that breeds with self-doubt and then is escalated, often deliberately, by fear. === I tore through the lessons, quietly keeping tabs on where I stood among…
I was caught up in the lonely thrill of being a teenager now, convinced that the adults around me had never been there themselves. === Was she picturing herself on a tropical island somewhere? With a different kind of man, or in a…
I hoped that someday my feelings for a man would knock me sideways, that I’d get swept into the upending, tsunami-like rush that seemed to power all the best love stories. === I’d been raised on the bedrock of football, basketball, and…
In my experience, you put a suit on any half-intelligent black man and white people tended to go bonkers. === To me, he was sort of like a unicorn — unusual to the point of seeming almost unreal. === Compared with my own lockstep march…
There was a time, he told me, when he’d been looser, more wild. He’d spent the first twenty years of his life going by the nickname Barry. As a teen, he smoked pot in the lush volcanic foothills of Oahu. At Occidental, he rode the waning…
It took effort, he cautioned. It required mapping strategy and listening to your neighbors and building trust in communities where trust was often lacking. It meant asking people you’d never met to give you a bit of their time or a tiny…
So many of my friends judged potential mates from the outside in, focusing first on their looks and financial prospects. If it turned out the person they’d chosen wasn’t a good communicator or was uncomfortable with being vulnerable, they…
We were both, of course, products of how we’d been raised. Barack had experienced marriage as ephemeral: His mother had married twice, divorced twice, and in each instance managed to move on with her life, career, and young children…
What was wrong with him? What was wrong with me? What kind of future did we have if we couldn’t sort this out? We weren’t fighting, but we were quarreling, and doing it attorney-style. === Like any newish couple, we were learning how to…
For me and Barack, this was as surprising as it was disappointing. No matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t seem to come up with a pregnancy. === We had one pregnancy test come back positive, which caused us both to forget every worry and…
When it came to working and parenting, we were doing it every sort of way. Some of us worked full-time, some part-time, some stayed at home with their kids. Some allowed their toddlers to eat hot dogs and corn chips; others served…
Barack was reluctant at first to try couples counseling. He was accustomed to throwing his mind at complicated problems and reasoning them out on his own. Sitting down in front of a stranger struck him as uncomfortable, if not a tad…
Barack, meanwhile, had listened to Toot, his white grandmother, make offhanded ethnic generalizations and even confess to her black grandson that she sometimes felt afraid when running into a black man on the street. We had lived for years…
Barack had received the authorization codes that would allow him to access the country’s nuclear arsenal and a briefing on the protocols for using them. From now on, wherever he went, he’d be closely trailed by a military aide carrying a…
The White House, one learns, operates with the express purpose of optimizing the well-being, efficiency, and overall power of one person — and that’s the president === He now had about fifty staffers reading and answering his mail. He had…
Most amusing to me was the fact that he now had three personal military valets whose duties included standing watch over his closet, making sure his shoes were shined, his shirts pressed, and his gym clothes always fresh and folded. Life…
Barack’s speech that night was detailed and sober-minded, acknowledging the grim state of the economy, the wars going on, the ongoing threat of terror attacks, and the anger of many Americans who felt the government’s bailout of the banks…
Barack ran on the treadmill about an hour every day, trying to beat back his physical restlessness. === I sighed sometimes, watching Barack pull the same dark suit out of his closet and head off to work without even needing a comb. His…
ATTENTION TO ALL THOSE WHO ENTER HERE: If you are coming into this room with sorrow or to feel sorry for my wounds, go elsewhere. The wounds I received, I got in a job I love, doing it for people I love, supporting the freedom of a country…