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 OBAMAFor 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.
More Michelle Obama Quotes
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In my blinding drive to excel, in my need to do things perfectly, I’d missed the signs and taken the wrong road.
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I was deeply, delightfully in love with a guy whose forceful intellect and ambition could possibly end up swallowing mine.
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Am I good enough? Yes, I am.
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[Y]ou may live in the world as it is, but you can still work to create the world as it should be.
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You can’t make decisions based on fear and the possibility of what might happen.
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It hurts to live after someone has died. It just does.
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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.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
I 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.
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Inspiration on its own was shallow; you had to back it up with hard work.
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The easiest way to disregard a woman’s voice is to package her as a scold.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
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.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
They didn’t own a house. We were their investment, me and Craig. Everything went into us.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
I began to understand that his version of hope reached far beyond mine: It was one thing to get yourself out of a stick place, I realized. It was another thing entirely to try and get the place itself unstuck.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
I wasn’t going to let one person’s opinion dislodge everything I thought I knew about myself. Instead, I switched my method without changing my goal.
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