“The noise doesn’t go away, but the most successful people I know have figured out how to live with it, to lean on the people who believe in them, and to push onward with their goals.”

Even white people were recognizing him now.

I’ve smiled for photos with people who call my husband horrible names on national television, but still want a framed keepsake for their mantel.

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.

Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this, I’d never forgive him.

Even if we didn’t know the context, we were instructed to remember that context existed. Everyone on earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.

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?

In my blinding drive to excel, in my need to do things perfectly, I’d missed the signs and taken the wrong road.

The more popular you became, the more haters you acquired.

I have had to learn that my voice has value. And if I don’t use it, what’s the point of being in the room?

Marriage, he told me early on, struck him as an unnecessary and overhyped convention.

Even if we didn’t know the context, we were instructed to remember that context existed. Everyone on earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.

The punches hurt, even if I understood that they had little to do with who I really was as a person.

America, our moment is now, Barack said. Our moment is now.

I look back on the discomfort of that moment now and recognize the more universal challenge of squaring who you are with where you come from and where you want to go.

We live by the paradigms we know.

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.

Success comes when we wake up every day in that never-ending pursuit of why we do what we do.

I don’t believe in hope. Hope is a beggar. Hope walks through the fire, faith leaps over it.

I will always believe in love, but my idea has changed from what I’ve always thought.

What we believe about ourselves is often times a reflection of how we feel god looks at us.

What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.

I’m not confused. I’m just well mixed.

I’ve always believed that you can funnel good things toward yourself by thinking positiviely.

I would absolutely characterize myself as ambitious.