It felt perverse, how the world just carried on. How everyone was still here, except for my Suzanne.
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.
More Michelle Obama Quotes
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The realities are that, you know, as a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station, you know.
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Now 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 OBAMA -
Bullies were scared people hiding inside scary people.
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Look how I’m managing, I wanted to say in those moments, to my audience of no one. Does everyone see that I’m pulling this off?
MICHELLE OBAMA -
We live by the paradigms we know.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
People who are truly strong lift others up. People who are truly powerful bring others together.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
The punches hurt, even if I understood that they had little to do with who I really was as a person.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
The arts are not just a nice thing to have or to do if there is free time or if one can afford it. Rather, paintings and poetry, music and fashion, design and dialogue, they all define who we are as a people and provide an account of our history for the next generation.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
For 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 OBAMA -
They didn’t own a house. We were their investment, me and Craig. Everything went into us.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
No one, I realized, was going to look out for me unless I pushed for it.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path–the my-isn’t-that-impressive- path– and keep you there for a long time.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
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.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
Even white people were recognizing him now.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
I like the idea of being rigorous about friendship.
MICHELLE OBAMA






