There’s a power in allowing yourself to be known and heard, in owning your unique story, in using your authentic voice. And there’s a grace in being willing to know and hear others.
MICHELLE OBAMAFor me, becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self. The journey doesn’t end.
More Michelle Obama Quotes
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Don’t be afraid. Be focused. Be determined. Be hopeful. Be empowered.
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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.
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Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own.
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I wasn’t going to let one person’s opinion dislodge everything I thought I knew about myself. Instead, I switched my method without changing my goal.
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It felt perverse, how the world just carried on. How everyone was still here, except for my Suzanne.
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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.
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And there’s grace in being willing to know and hear others. This, for me, is how we become.
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When you’re First Lady, America shows itself to you in its extremes.
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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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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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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?
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Bullies were scared people hiding inside scary people.
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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.
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just do what works for you, because there will always be someone who thinks differently.
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a happy marriage can be a vexation, that it’s a contract best renewed and renewed again, even quietly and privately—even alone.
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What I notice about men, all men, is that their order is me, my family, God is in there somewhere, but me is first.
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Marriage, he told me early on, struck him as an unnecessary and overhyped convention.
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Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result. It’s vulnerability that breeds with self-doubt and then is escalated, often deliberately, by fear.
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The more popular you became, the more haters you acquired.
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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.
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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 ?
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failure is a feeling long before it’s an actual result.
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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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My most important title is still mom-in-chief. My daughters are still the heart of my heart and the center of my world.
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In my blinding drive to excel, in my need to do things perfectly, I’d missed the signs and taken the wrong road.
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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 OBAMA