“Empower yourselves with a good education, then get out there and use that education to build a country worthy of your boundless promise.”

Don’t be afraid. Be focused. Be determined. Be hopeful. Be empowered.

Good relationships feel good. They feel right. They don’t hurt.

failure is a feeling long before it’s an actual result.

I was deeply, delightfully in love with a guy whose forceful intellect and ambition could possibly end up swallowing mine.

If you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others.

The realities are that, you know, as a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station, you know.

Focus on what you can control. Be a good person every day. Vote. Read. Treat one another kindly. Follow the law. Don’t tweet nasty stuff.

When you’re First Lady, America shows itself to you in its extremes.

Bullies were scared people hiding inside scary people.

I’ve learned that it’s harder to hate up close.

The choice, as he saw it, was this: You give up or you work for change. What’s better for us? Barack called to the people gathered in the room. Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?

You don’t really know how attached you are until you move away, until you’ve experienced what it means to be dislodged, a cork floating on the ocean of another place.

Time, as far as my father was concerned, was a gift you gave to other people.

I began to understand that his version of hope reached far beyond mine: It was one thing to get yourself out of a stuck place, I realized. It was another thing entirely to try and get the place itself unstuck.

It hurts to live after someone has died. It just does.

His money went largely toward books, which to him were like sacred objects, providing ballast for his mind.

Untutored courage is useless in the face of educated bullets.

One of the goals of education should be to teach that life is precious.

All of life is education and everybody is a teacher and everybody is forever a pupil.

They agreed that it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.

I never learned hate at home, or shame. I had to go to school for that.

The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.

That was a very good way to get educated, working on the senior problems and learning how to pronounce things.

Baddest bitch with a degree.