If you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others.
MICHELLE OBAMAIf you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others.
MICHELLE OBAMA[Y]ou may live in the world as it is, but you can still work to create the world as it should be.
MICHELLE OBAMAYou 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.
MICHELLE OBAMABut 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.
MICHELLE OBAMAYour story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own.
MICHELLE OBAMAThe more popular you became, the more haters you acquired.
MICHELLE OBAMAWhat I notice about men, all men, is that their order is me, my family, God is in there somewhere, but me is first.
MICHELLE OBAMAThe noise doesn’t go away, but the most successful people I know have figured out how to live with it, to lean on the people who believe in them, and to push onward with their goals.
MICHELLE OBAMAEven 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.
MICHELLE OBAMAGood relationships feel good. They feel right. They don’t hurt.
MICHELLE OBAMAI grew up with a disabled dad in a too-small house with not much money in a starting-to-fail neighborhood, and I also grew up surrounded by love and music in a diverse city in a country where an education can take you far. I had nothing or I had everything. It depends on which way you want to tell it.
MICHELLE OBAMAEverything was not lost. This was the message we needed to carry forward. It’s what I truly believed. It wasn’t ideal, but it was our reality—the world as it is. We needed now to be resolute, to keep our feet pointed in the direction of progress.
MICHELLE OBAMAI 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?
MICHELLE OBAMAa happy marriage can be a vexation, that it’s a contract best renewed and renewed again, even quietly and privately—even alone.
MICHELLE OBAMAMy most important title is still mom-in-chief. My daughters are still the heart of my heart and the center of my world.
MICHELLE OBAMAEveryone on Earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.
MICHELLE OBAMA