David Garrow

“Barack went on to explain that “there was a voice inside me that I could hear that was true—a kernel of myself—this is from a Borges poem—sort of a love poem to a mistress of his,” one that Jorge Luis Borges had written in 1934. “He says ‘I offer you that kernel of myself that is basically untouched, doesn’t traffic in the trivial or the petty or is just there’” (a close rendition of Borges’s declaration, “I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow—the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams, and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities”). Barack told Weisberg, “I felt that. That sounds like god to me,” and “to me god is connection . . . making connections, and in that connection, that’s where I find god.”
― David Garrow, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama – The Definitive Biography of the Formative Years and Forces Behind the 44th President