And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values, like you work hard for what you want in life. That your word is your bond; that you do what you say you’re going to do. That you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don’t know them and even if you don’t agree with them.
MICHELLE OBAMAI 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.
More Michelle Obama Quotes
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And there’s grace in being willing to know and hear others. This, for me, is how we become.
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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?
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When you’re First Lady, America shows itself to you in its extremes.
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I’ve learned that it’s harder to hate up close.
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We live by the paradigms we know.
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If you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others.
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Time, as far as my father was concerned, was a gift you gave to other people.
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Marriage, he told me early on, struck him as an unnecessary and overhyped convention.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
We should always have three friends in our lives-one who walks ahead who we look up to and follow; one who walks beside us, who is with us every step of our journey; and then, one who we reach back for and bring along after we’ve cleared the way.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
When they go low, we go high.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
At fifty-four, I am still in progress, and I hope that I always will be.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
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 -
I was deeply, delightfully in love with a guy whose forceful intellect and ambition could possibly end up swallowing mine.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
I just wanted to achieve. Or maybe I didn’t want to be dismissed as incapable of achievement.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
In my blinding drive to excel, in my need to do things perfectly, I’d missed the signs and taken the wrong road.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
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.
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 -
Kids will invest more, when they feel they’re being invested in.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
His money went largely toward books, which to him were like sacred objects, providing ballast for his mind.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
You’ve got to be twice as good to get half as far.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
The burden of assimilation is put largely on the shoulders of minority students.
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.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
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?
MICHELLE OBAMA -
It hurts to live after someone has died. It just does.
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We explain when someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you do not stoop to their level. Our motto is when they go low, you go high.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
I hate diversity workshops. Real change comes from having enough comfort to be really honest and say something very uncomfortable.
MICHELLE OBAMA