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

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.

We were planting seeds of change, the fruit of which we might never see. We had to be patient.

It’s easier to hold onto your own stereotypes and misconceptions, it makes you feel justified in your own ignorance. That’s America. So the challenge for us is, are we ready for change?

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.

there’s no straight line between effort and reward.

You find ways to adapt. If you’re in it forever, there’s really no choice.

No one, I realized, was going to look out for me unless I pushed for it.

Youth and what the Italians so prettily call stamina. The vigor, the fire, that enables you to love and create. When you’ve lost that, you’ve lost everything.

I criticize by creation, not by finding fault.

All oppression creates a state of war. And this is no exception.

Overman is the man who grounds Being anew-in the rigor of knowledge and in the grand style of creation.

I am the flail of god. Had you not created great sins, god would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.

The path is the destination, and the destination is hidden in the path, as the Creator is hidden in creation.

Democracy, the deceitful theory that the Jew would insinuate – namely, that theory that all men are created equal.

My emotions allow me to create that is something only I dictate.