Life was teaching me that progress and change happen slowly. Not in two years, four years, or even a lifetime. We were planting seeds of change, the fruit of which we might never see. We had to be patient.
MICHELLE OBAMANo one, I realized, was going to look out for me unless I pushed for it.
More Michelle Obama Quotes
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We live by the paradigms we know.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
The punches hurt, even if I understood that they had little to do with who I really was as a person.
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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.
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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.
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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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Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?
MICHELLE OBAMA -
Fulfillment, I’m sure, struck her as a rich person’s conceit.
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Everyone on Earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.
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For me, becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self. The journey doesn’t end.
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No one, I realized, was going to look out for me unless I pushed for it.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
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.
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At fifty-four, I am still in progress, and I hope that I always will be.
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Good relationships feel good. They feel right. They don’t hurt.
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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.
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He’s always asking: ‘Is that new? I haven’t seen that before.’ It’s like, Why don’t you mind your own business? Solve world hunger. Get out of my closet.
MICHELLE OBAMA






