Over emphatic negatives always suggest that what is being denied may be what is really being asserted. – Jonathan Raban
Dreams From My Father reveals more about Obama than is usually known about political leaders until after theyre dead. Perhaps more than it intends, it shows his mind working, in real time, sentence by sentence, in what feels like a private audience with the reader. – Jonathan Raban
Critics? Dont talk to me of critics! You think some jackanapes journalist, his soul eaten away by the maggots of jealousy and failure, has anything worthwhile to say of art? I dont. – Jonathan Raban
The only book by a modern president that bears serious comparison with Obamas Dreams From My Father is Jimmy Carters short campaign autobiography, Why Not the Best?, published in 1975. – Jonathan Raban
Dear to us are those who love us… but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life; they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was, nor forward to what it might be, but living in the present and accepting it as it is now. – Anne Morrow Lindbergh