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.
MICHELLE OBAMAa happy marriage can be a vexation, that it’s a contract best renewed and renewed again, even quietly and privately—even alone.
More Michelle Obama Quotes
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I didn’t want them ever to believe that life began when the man of the house arrived home. We didn’t wait for Dad. It was his job now to catch up with us.
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What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.
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The easiest way to disregard a woman’s voice is to package her as a scold.
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The arts are not just a nice thing to have or to do if there is free time or if one can afford it. Rather, paintings and poetry, music and fashion, design and dialogue, they all define who we are as a people and provide an account of our history for the next generation.
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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?
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The lesson being that in life you control what you can.
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there’s no straight line between effort and reward.
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Time, as far as my father was concerned, was a gift you gave to other people.
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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.
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For me, marriage was more like a full-on merger, a reconfiguring of two lives into one, with the well-being of a family taking precedence over any one agenda or goal.
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Everyone on Earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.
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They didn’t own a house. We were their investment, me and Craig. Everything went into us.
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I hate diversity workshops. Real change comes from having enough comfort to be really honest and say something very uncomfortable.
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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.
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We live by the paradigms we know.
MICHELLE OBAMA