“I just wanted to achieve. Or maybe I didn’t want to be dismissed as incapable of achievement.”

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.

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.

I think it is just terrible and disgusting how everyone has treated Lance Armstrong, especially after what he achieved winning seven Tour de France races while on drugs. When I was on drugs I couldn’t even find my bike.

It is no achievement to walk a tightrope laid flat on the floor.

Propaganda is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. If the means achieves the end then the means is good. The new Ministry has no other aim than to unite the nation behind the ideal of the national revolution.

It’s a great honour to have the nickname of Iceman, it makes me feel very proud of my achievements.

We cannot achieve greatness unless we lose all interest in being great.

Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it.

The challenges I have faced – among them material poverty, chronic illness, and being raised by a single mother – are not uncommon, but neither have they kept me from uncommon achievements.

But to find, all at once, right before your eyes, that the impossible had been mysteriously achieved by man himself: this staggers the mind!