“Do not bring people in your life who weigh you down. And trust your instincts, good relationships feel good. They feel right. They don’t hurt. They’re not painful. That’s not just with somebody you want to marry, but it’s with the friends that you choose. It’s with the people you surround yourselves with.”

One of the lessons that I grew up with was to always stay true to yourself and never let what somebody else says distract you from your goals. And so when I hear about negative and false attacks, I really don’t invest any energy in them, because I know who I am.

And there’s grace in being willing to know and hear others. This, for me, is how we become.

Don’t be afraid. Be focused. Be determined. Be hopeful. Be empowered.

Good relationships feel good. They feel right. They don’t hurt.

failure is a feeling long before it’s an actual result.

I was deeply, delightfully in love with a guy whose forceful intellect and ambition could possibly end up swallowing mine.

If you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others.

The realities are that, you know, as a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station, you know.

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.

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.

Unless you intend your wife to be a true missionary, not merely a wife, home-maker, and friend, do not join us.

A true friend is the one who holds your hand and touches your heart.

Good habits make time your ally. Bad habits make time your enemy.

She discovered with great delight that one does not love one’s children just because they are one’s children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.

We only want that which is given naturally to all peoples of the world, to be masters of our own fate, not of others, and in cooperation and friendship with others.

If we let our friend become cold and selfish and exacting without a remonstrance, we are no true lover, no true friend.

Usually action films have a formula: good guy gets in trouble, his wife dies, friends have problems, so he goes to the mountain, learns martial arts, comes back, and kills the bad guy.

Love is mainly an affair of short spasms. If these spasms disappoint us, love dies. It is very seldom that it weathers the experience and becomes friendship.