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 OBAMABut 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.
More Michelle Obama Quotes
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Kids will invest more, when they feel they’re being invested in.
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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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I didn’t want them ever to believe that life began when the man of the house arrived home. We didn’t wait for Dad. It was his job now to catch up with us.
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Here’s a memory, which like most memories is imperfect and subjective—collected long ago like a beach pebble and slipped into the pocket of my mind.
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I 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.
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You’ve got to be twice as good to get half as far.
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there’s no straight line between effort and reward.
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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.
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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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I was determined to be someone who told the truth, using my voice to lift up the voiceless when I could, and to not disappear on people in need. I understood that when I showed up somewhere,
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We were planting seeds of change, the fruit of which we might never see. We had to be patient.
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When you’re First Lady, America shows itself to you in its extremes.
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Friendships between women, as any woman will tell you, are built of a thousand small kindnesses, swapped back and forth and over again.
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The punches hurt, even if I understood that they had little to do with who I really was as a person.
MICHELLE OBAMA