You find ways to adapt. If you’re in it forever, there’s really no choice.
MICHELLE OBAMAYou find ways to adapt. If you’re in it forever, there’s really no choice.
MICHELLE OBAMAThe truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more.
MICHELLE OBAMANow that I’m an adult, I realize that kids know at a very young age when they’re being devalued, when adults aren’t invested enough to help them learn. Their anger over it can manifest itself as unruliness. It’s hardly their fault. They aren’t bad kids. They’re just trying to survive bad circumstances.
MICHELLE OBAMAIn my blinding drive to excel, in my need to do things perfectly, I’d missed the signs and taken the wrong road.
MICHELLE OBAMAHere’s a memory, which like most memories is imperfect and subjective—collected long ago like a beach pebble and slipped into the pocket of my mind.
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 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 OBAMAInspiration on its own was shallow; you had to back it up with hard work.
MICHELLE OBAMAThe punches hurt, even if I understood that they had little to do with who I really was as a person.
MICHELLE OBAMAIt felt perverse, how the world just carried on. How everyone was still here, except for my Suzanne.
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 OBAMAFor 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.
MICHELLE OBAMAYou’ve got to be twice as good to get half as far.
MICHELLE OBAMAI began to understand that his version of hope reached far beyond mine: It was one thing to get yourself out of a stick place, I realized. It was another thing entirely to try and get the place itself unstuck.
MICHELLE OBAMAHis money went largely toward books, which to him were like sacred objects, providing ballast for his mind.
MICHELLE OBAMAThe easiest way to disregard a woman’s voice is to package her as a scold.
MICHELLE OBAMA