Kids will invest more, when they feel they’re being invested in.
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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The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more.
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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.
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I hate diversity workshops. Real change comes from having enough comfort to be really honest and say something very uncomfortable.
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It hurts to live after someone has died. It just does.
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Fulfillment, I’m sure, struck her as a rich person’s conceit.
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No one, I realized, was going to look out for me unless I pushed for it.
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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.
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What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.
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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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But 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.
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It’s remarkable how a stereotype functions as an actual trap. How many angry black women have been caught in the circular logic of that phrase? When you aren’t being listened to, why wouldn’t you get louder? If you’re written off as angry or emotional, doesn’t that just cause more of the same?
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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.
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It was painful, but time pushed us all forward.
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When you’re First Lady, America shows itself to you in its extremes.
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His money went largely toward books, which to him were like sacred objects, providing ballast for his mind.
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Don’t be afraid. Be focused. Be determined. Be hopeful. Be empowered.
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People who are truly strong lift others up. People who are truly powerful bring others together.
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There’s a power in allowing yourself to be known and heard, in owning your unique story, in using your authentic voice. And there’s a grace in being willing to know and hear 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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It felt perverse, how the world just carried on. How everyone was still here, except for my Suzanne.
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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.
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Marriage, he told me early on, struck him as an unnecessary and overhyped convention.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
failure is a feeling long before it’s an actual result.
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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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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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You don’t really know how attached you are until you move away, until you’ve experienced what it means to be dislodged, a cork floating on the ocean of another place.
MICHELLE OBAMA