Wise Iris

A few excerpts from ‘Dreams From My Father’. Some of my favorite thoughts and quotes from President Obama and his family, friends and other people he encountered in his growing as a man.

“I had grown too comfortable in my solitude, the safest place I knew.”

“Confidence. The secret to a man’s success.”

“Sometimes you can’t worry about hurt. Sometimes you worry only about getting where you have to go.”

“Every black man was Thurgood Marshall or Sidney Portier; every black woman Fannie Lou Hamer or Lena Horne. To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear.”

“A woman with dreams always has problems.”

“For the first time in my life, I found myself thinking deeply about money: my own lack of it, the pursuit of it, the crude but undeniable peace it could buy.”

“If everyone is family, then no one is family.”

“If I say I will do something, I must do it. Otherwise how will people know that my word is true?”

“I think perhaps education doesn’t do us much good unless it is mixed with sweat.”

“Where there is no experience, I believe the wise man is silent.”

“So I stopped giving advice and just listened.”

——- Quotes from the excerpt of ‘The Audacity of Hope’——-

“…the arguments of liberals are more often grounded in reason and fact.”

“Their purpose is not to persuade the other side, but to keep their bases agitated and assured of the rightness of their respective causes.”

“…politics today is a business and not a mission.”

I loved President Obama’s ‘Dreams From My Father’. I learned so much from it, not only about the great man, but about myself. I also learned A LOT (more than 150) of new words and terms from reading the book. Everyone knows that I love words (and learning new ones) so I decided that while reading the book, I would highlight words that I didn’t know/wanted to know more about. Some words, I already know, but I had to refresh my memory on them in order to apply them to the context of which President Obama was using them, and others (most) were new to me. Some of the terms that I wondered about pertain to President Obama’s trip to Kenya and the Luo language.

It’s a LONG list, but here are the words:

Fissures, Plumb, Subversive, Canings, Insolence, Arcane, Ceylon (place), Dogmatic, Slough, Emaciated, Stilted, Eminent =), Panache, Pastorialists, Sidled, Dereliction, Glowering, Ingratiating, Candor, Veracity, Antebellum, Octoroom, Miscegenation, Perverse, Peripatetic, Sinewy, Provincialism, Eccentricities, Obviate, Unassailable, Pallor, Imperturbable, Idiosyncrasies, Solicitude, Demagogue, Pervaded, Conscripted, Disdain, Chasm, Chastened, Relent, Dejection, Volatile, Nilote (people), Pilfered, Dewlapped, Aphorisms, Sagacious, Vigilant, Desecrated, Farce, Homilies, Expedient(ce), Temperament, Vocation, Tepid, Guilleless, Bulwark, Hindsight, Intermittently, Earnest, Marxist, Conical, Corrugated, Morose, Impertinence, Self-Deprecatory, Gesticulating, Errant, Shrapnel, Undaunted, Roan, Roiling, Spigot, Reverie, Flint, Innoculate, Wazunga (Luo term), Bleating, Irrigation, Exhumed, Masai (people), Circumvent, Trodden, Purported, Monolithic, Perpetual, Antecedants, Fervor, Cynical, Ascetic, Catechisms, Ephemeral, Diffident, Heretic, Saplings, Laity, Escarpment, Tedium, Patronage, Peevish, Palpable, Imperious, Lexicon, Tenuous, Pathology, Inculate, Pestilence, Tutelage, Stolid, Munificence, Ballast, Insularity, Legerdemain, Filch, Phalanx, Gallows, Trite, Derision, Usurped, Erudite, Sonorous, Inchoate, Prosaic, Apartheid, Nascent, Caprice, Despotism, Disgorged, Succession, Warily, Stucco, Cavernous, Apparatus, Parochialism, Brusquely, Guile, Cloven, Direst, Magnanimity, Vehemently, Vitriol, Fulminate, Turpitued, Metastasize, Malfeasance, Invective, Bristled, Acrimony, Litany, Detente, Perfidy, Sedate, Awry, Sowing, Zealots, Cabal, Ambiguities.

I guess this is what it’s like… =)

(Source: beyonce)

He drives me wild.

(Source: beyonce)

I really enjoyed this book. While reading it, A LOT of interesting things caught my attention. Some, I found profound. Others, I liked because they related to how I can become a better person. I also found that although I didn’t necessarily agree 100% with some of the point of views written, they still forced me to think past my normal thoughts on certain issues and topics. Mitch Albom wrote an amazing book that I feel allows for people to look back on their lives and analyze what experiences and what people helped shape who they have become and have yet to grow into being. By reading this book, you learn more about yourself. I suggest everyone reads it at least once. The points that are BOLDED are the points that resignated most.

Lessons from “The First Person”

1. “All endings are beginnings. We just don’t it at the time.”
2. “Each of us (the people you meet in Heaven, who you encounter in your life) was in your life for a reason. You may not have known the reason at the time, and that is what heaven is for. For understanding your life on earth.”
3. “…scenery without solace is meaningless.”
4. “Take one story, viewed from different angles.”
5. “Now take that same story from a different angle.”
6. “…there are no random acts…we are all connected…you can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind.”
7. “Fairness does not govern life and death. If it did, no good person would ever die young.”
8. “…because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn’t just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed.”
9. “One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole.”
10. “Strangers are just family you have yet to come to know.”
11. “The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.”

Lessons from ‘The Second Person’

1. “Dying? Not the end of everything. We think it is. But what happens on earth is only the beginning.”
2. Every morning we wake up, we have a fresh new world to work with.
3. “Sacrifice is a part of life. It’s supposed to be. It’s not something to regret. It’s something to aspire. Little sacrifices. Big Sacrifices.”
4. “Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you’re not really losing it. You’re just passing it on to someone else.”

Lessons from the “Third Person”

1. “All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers.”
2. “Things [happen] before you are born and still affect you. And people who come before your time affect you as well.”
3. “Parents rarely let go of their children, so children, let go of them. They move on. They move away. The moments that used to define them- a mother’s approval, a father’s nod- are covered by moments of their own accomplishments.”
4. “Silence [can be an escape], but silence is rarely a refuge. [Your] thoughts still [haunt you].
5. “Which [is] worse when left unexplained: a life, or a death?”
6. “Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves.”

 Lessons from “The Fourth Person”

1. “People say they find love, as if it were an object hidden by a rock. But love takes many forms, and it is never the same for any man and woman. What people find then is a certain love.”
2. “Lost love is still love. It takes a different form, that’s all.”
3. “Live has to end.”
4. “Love doesn’t.”
5. “You made me love you… I didn’t want to do it…and all the time you knew it.”

Lessons from “The Fifth Person”

I didn’t really have any lessons from this part of the book. But the book did come full circle with this person. The fifth person connects to the second person, which just shows that life (and death) has a funny way of working things out.

Nice to meet you. Let’s see how this goes…

I am always on the losing side of the unknown…

Sometimes I regret that I don’t let my feelings show…

But like I said once before, let’s see how this goes…

These three souls…beautiful. A few of my favorite spirits/musicians.

Twenty years from now, ask me what my favorite song was in my youth…

2012 Summer Olympics!!!!!!!!!! Let’s go!!!!!!!!