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.
MICHELLE OBAMAAmerica, our moment is now, Barack said. Our moment is now.
More Michelle Obama Quotes
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You find ways to adapt. If you’re in it forever, there’s really no choice.
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My most important title is still mom-in-chief. My daughters are still the heart of my heart and the center of my world.
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Hearing them, I realized that they weren’t at all smarter than the rest of us. They were simply emboldened, floating on an ancient tide of superiority, buoyed by the fact that history had never told them anything different.
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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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For 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.
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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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They didn’t own a house. We were their investment, me and Craig. Everything went into us.
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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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Dominance, even the threat of it, is a form of dehumanization. It’s the ugliest kind of power.
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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.
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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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Even white people were recognizing him now.
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And there’s grace in being willing to know and hear others. This, for me, is how we become.
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Time, as far as my father was concerned, was a gift you gave to other people.
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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.
MICHELLE OBAMA