“Obama was the first president whose biography makes sense to me. He ca...” — Claire Messud Quote

“Obama was the first president whose biography makes sense to me. He can walk into a room anywhere and find common ground with any person.”

“I believed in their wisdom, and their gifts for happiness, or at least contentment, gifts that had eluded the next generation of my mother, my father, and my aunt.”

“They, too, carry the source within them. But for their children, cast into a windblown century without God, where is there to be but alone and unseen, anonymous in the crowd? Who will carry us back to a place that lives only in the vast imaginary? 'Do you not see how a caged bird, oh youth, / Breaks into song when it recalls its ancestral home?”