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It’s remarkable how a stereotype functions as an actual trap. How many angry black women have been caught in the circular logic of that phrase? When you aren’t being listened to, why wouldn’t you get louder? If you’re written off as angry or emotional, doesn’t that just cause more of the same?

Michelle Obama

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

Character Quick Yourself
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.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Attachment Experience Ocean Place Yourself
Fulfillment, I’m sure, struck her as a rich person’s conceit.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Person Rich Satisfaction
We were planting seeds of change, the fruit of which we might never see. We had to be patient.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Change Patience Plant See
We live by the paradigms we know.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Live One Liner
It hurts to live after someone has died. It just does.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Death Hurt Live Myself
Kids will invest more, when they feel they’re being invested in.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Children Feeling Investment Worth
The 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 OBAMA

Care Education Health Pieces Truth
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

Failure Feeling Myself Plant Result Success
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 ?
MICHELLE OBAMA

Black Life Oppression Power Woman
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.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Direction Live Plant Possible Success
Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result. It’s vulnerability that breeds with self-doubt and then is escalated, often deliberately, by fear.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Doubt Failure Fear Feeling Result Vulnerable
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.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Country Hate Language Myself Reflection Spirit True Understand Word
It’s easier to hold onto your own stereotypes and misconceptions, it makes you feel justified in your own ignorance. That’s America. So the challenge for us is, are we ready for change?
MICHELLE OBAMA

Challenge Change Easy Feeling Justice
As a kid, you learn to measure long before you understand the size or value of anything. Eventually, if you’re lucky, you learn that you’ve been measuring all wrong.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Children Learning Understand Value Wrong
I was deeply, delightfully in love with a guy whose forceful intellect and ambition could possibly end up swallowing mine.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Ambitious Force Intellectual Love Myself Possible

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