“As a kid, you learn to measure long before you understand the size or value of anything. Eventually, if you’re lucky, you learn that you’ve been measuring all wrong.”

Even white people were recognizing him now.

I’ve smiled for photos with people who call my husband horrible names on national television, but still want a framed keepsake for their mantel.

Do not bring people in your life who weigh you down. And trust your instincts, good relationships feel good. They feel right. They don’t hurt. They’re not painful. That’s not just with somebody you want to marry, but it’s with the friends that you choose. It’s with the people you surround yourselves with.

Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this, I’d never forgive him.

Even if we didn’t know the context, we were instructed to remember that context existed. Everyone on earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.

Look how I’m managing, I wanted to say in those moments, to my audience of no one. Does everyone see that I’m pulling this off?

In my blinding drive to excel, in my need to do things perfectly, I’d missed the signs and taken the wrong road.

The more popular you became, the more haters you acquired.

I have had to learn that my voice has value. And if I don’t use it, what’s the point of being in the room?

Marriage, he told me early on, struck him as an unnecessary and overhyped convention.

Even if we didn’t know the context, we were instructed to remember that context existed. Everyone on earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.

The punches hurt, even if I understood that they had little to do with who I really was as a person.

America, our moment is now, Barack said. Our moment is now.

I look back on the discomfort of that moment now and recognize the more universal challenge of squaring who you are with where you come from and where you want to go.

We live by the paradigms we know.

This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path—the my-isn’t-that-impressive path—and keep you there for a long time.

We must teach our children to resolve their conflicts with words, not weapons.

We’re all a nation that believes we’re children of the same god.

If we call ourselves children of God, then others are also children of God.

I wouldn’t be a part of anything that had acts of violence toward children. I don’t think I would do a horror film, either. That just doesn’t sit well on my soul.

When I was a baby, my mama told me son, always be a good boy, don’t ever play with guns. But I shot a man in Reno.

I was never an actress — none of us kids at Metro were. We were just good to look at.

That’s universal – we all want to bring every good thing to our children. But what’s not universal is our ability to provide every good thing.

I was not a classic mother. But my kids were never palmed off to boarding school. So, I didn’t bake cookies. You can buy cookies, but you can’t buy love.