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

Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?

Life was teaching me that progress and change happen slowly. Not in two years, four years, or even a lifetime. We were planting seeds of change, the fruit of which we might never see. We had to be patient.

It felt perverse, how the world just carried on. How everyone was still here, except for my Suzanne.

[Y]ou may live in the world as it is, but you can still work to create the world as it should be.

We explain when someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you do not stoop to their level. Our motto is when they go low, you go high.

When they go low, we go high.

We should always have three friends in our lives-one who walks ahead who we look up to and follow; one who walks beside us, who is with us every step of our journey; and then, one who we reach back for and bring along after we’ve cleared the way.

Since stepping reluctantly into public life, I’ve been held up as the most powerful woman in the world and taken down as an angry black woman. I’ve wanted to ask my detractors which part of that phrase matters to them the most—is it angry or black or woman ?

Kids will invest more, when they feel they’re being invested in.

But as I’ve said, failure is a feeling long before it’s an actual result. And for me, it felt like that’s exactly what she was planting—a suggestion of failure long before I’d even tried to succeed.

They didn’t own a house. We were their investment, me and Craig. Everything went into us.

I wanted Americans to understand that words matter—that the hateful language they heard coming from their TVs did not reflect the true spirit of our country and that we could vote against it.

a happy marriage can be a vexation, that it’s a contract best renewed and renewed again, even quietly and privately—even alone.

At fifty-four, I am still in progress, and I hope that I always will be.

It was possible, I knew, to live on two planes at once—to have one’s feet planted in reality but pointed in the direction of progress.

Inspiration on its own was shallow; you had to back it up with hard work.

I would have been very happy just cruising around and enjoying the unexpected. I’ve never been ambitious.

I am a very ambitious girl.

I’m planning my most ambitious tattoo yet. You can never have enough tats.

I’m not very ambitious at all.

Success lulls you. It makes the most ambitious of us complacent and sloppy. In a way, you have to cultivate a kind of amnesia and forget all of your previous prosperity.

Maybe it’s a little ambitious of me to presume that no matter how big the film is, that I can always go down to the shop to buy a pint of milk.

Don’t be afraid to be ambitious about your goals. Hard work never stops. Neither should your dreams.

All women are ambitious naturally.