“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?”

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.

My daughters are the heart of my heart and the center of my world.

I have to enjoy every moment.

I’ve had happy moments in my life, but I don’t think that happiness– being happy– is a perpetual state that anyone can be in. Life isn’t that way.

No sin, no matter how momentarily pleasurable, comforting, or habitual, is worth missing what God has for us.

Enjoy every moments in life.

You know, eternal life does not start when we go to heaven. It starts the moment you reach out to Jesus. He never turns His back on anyone. And He is waiting for you.

Do not wait for life. Do not long for it. Be aware, always and at every moment, that the miracle is in the here and now.

Every minute should be enjoyed and savored.

Now we allow that life begins with conception, because we contend that the soul also begins from conception; life taking its commencement at the same moment and place that the soul does.