“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.”

It felt perverse, how the world just carried on. How everyone was still here, except for my Suzanne.

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

We explain when someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you do not stoop to their level. Our motto is when they go low, you go high.

When they go low, we go high.

We should always have three friends in our lives-one who walks ahead who we look up to and follow; one who walks beside us, who is with us every step of our journey; and then, one who we reach back for and bring along after we’ve cleared the way.

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 ?

Kids will invest more, when they feel they’re being invested in.

But 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.

They didn’t own a house. We were their investment, me and Craig. Everything went into us.

I wanted Americans to understand that words matter—that the hateful language they heard coming from their TVs did not reflect the true spirit of our country and that we could vote against it.

a happy marriage can be a vexation, that it’s a contract best renewed and renewed again, even quietly and privately—even alone.

At fifty-four, I am still in progress, and I hope that I always will be.

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.

Inspiration on its own was shallow; you had to back it up with hard work.

You’ve got to be twice as good to get half as far.

He’s always asking: ‘Is that new? I haven’t seen that before.’ It’s like, Why don’t you mind your own business? Solve world hunger. Get out of my closet.

You deserve a love that is a safe place for your soul.

We all deserve someone who gives a damn.

The most damnable and pernicious heresy that has ever plagued the mind of man was the idea that somehow he could make himself good enough to deserve to live with an all-holy God.

Many people agree with me that many things are not clear in football these days and it is not something people who watch football deserve. The situation will be the same while football is run by people who do not understand football.

For what I have publish’d, I can only hope to be pardon’d; but for what I have burned, I deserve to be prais’d.

I want you to know, that you deserve the best. You’re beautiful.

Even when you’re at your worst, you deserve a pair hands that hold you up with love.

There is but one way I know of conversing safely with all men; that is, not by concealing what we say or do, but by saying or doing nothing that deserves to be concealed.