Time, as far as my father was concerned, was a gift you gave to other people.
MICHELLE OBAMANow 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.
More Michelle Obama Quotes
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I just wanted to achieve. Or maybe I didn’t want to be dismissed as incapable of achievement.
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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.
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Dominance, even the threat of it, is a form of dehumanization. It’s the ugliest kind of power.
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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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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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Fulfillment, I’m sure, struck her as a rich person’s conceit.
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Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own.
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 -
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.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
What I notice about men, all men, is that their order is me, my family, God is in there somewhere, but me is first.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
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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His money went largely toward books, which to him were like sacred objects, providing ballast for his mind.
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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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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.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
I wanted Americans to understand that words matter—that the hateful language they heard coming from their TVs did not reflect the true spirit of our country and that we could vote against it.
MICHELLE OBAMA