A Quote by Barack Obama

On Easter or Christmas Day, my mother might drag me to church, just as she dragged me to the Buddhist temple, the Chinese New Year celebration, the Shinto shrine, and ancient Hawaiian burial sites.
I have to thank my mother for this. When I was a little boy she used to teach me poems. I would go in church and tell the poems in church for the Easter program, and again for Mother's Day and any occasion she felt would fit. I was very energetic with delivery at that time as a boy, so it stuck with me.
My grandmother and mother were from Italy, so I was raised Catholic. That kind of just meant going to church on Easter and Christmas. I saw a radical transformation in my family when they started going to a Christian church. I watched them fall in love with God.
My childhood was all about going to church, singing in church. And later on, after I got a little older, my mother taught me how to do poems for Easter and Mother's Day, recitals and so on. I got attached to that, so as I got older and older, I began to recite poetry.
It goes Christmas, New Year's Eve, Valentine's Day. Is that fair to anyone who's alone? These are all days you gotta be with someone. And if you didn't get around to killing yourself at Christmas or New Year's, boom! There's Valentine's Day. I think there should be one more after Valentine's Day just called, 'Who could love you?'
I found eternal peace in a Shinto shrine. I've been to Shinto shrines and God is everywhere. Christ is one of the ways! God is everywhere.
I didn't have a curfew and always slept at friends' houses, but on Sundays, Mom dragged me to church. It was the best thing she did for me. I was moved just to be there and to feel God had a plan for me.
My mother was a not-too-devoted atheist. She went to Episcopal church on Christmas Eve every year, and that was mostly it.
But to the slave mother New Year's day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns.
But to the slave mother New Year's day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning; and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns.
When my, British-Church of England mother married my, Canadian-Jewish Father, the deal was that she would embrace Judaism, but wouldn't give up her Christmas tree. So, I grew up with Christmas every year. I loved it then and I love it now.
The two great moments in human history are the day that Christ was born and the day He was raised from the dead. These are represented by Christmas and Easter - the two biggest holidays for the church. People who don't even go to church do go on these days.
You must wake and call me early, call me early, mother dear; To-morrow'll be the happiest time of all the glad New Year,- Of all the glad New Year, mother, the maddest, merriest day; For I'm to be Queen o' the May, mother, I'm to be queen o' the May.
My father was a big Bruce Lee fan. He's Chinese-Hawaiian, and my mother is Chinese. He used to take us to all these really fantastical films with martial arts in them.
My mother turned me onto St. Jude back in the days when I was wild and crazy. She took me to the shrine on Rampart Street.
For me, glamour was always an escape. When I was a kid, my mother was hospitalized, she was schizophrenic. When she was sick, she wouldn't do her hair or her makeup, and she just looked terrible. But when she got on medication and she was happy, she would go to the beauty parlor and wear makeup. So I really associate glamour with being happy. If you put on high heels and lipstick or get a new outfit, you feel great. It's a celebration of loving yourself, and the whole ritual of it is so great.
I talked to my mother about it a lot. I asked her what it was like to grow up in New York and Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, and I asked her about a woman leaving her husband. I asked her about how she would feel about that woman, and my mother grew up in the Church Of God In Christ, and she told me that the woman might be isolated because the other women thought she might go and come after their husbands. That's how they thought then.
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