“Marriage, he told me early on, struck him as an unnecessary and overhyped convention.”

The more popular you became, the more haters you acquired.

I have had to learn that my voice has value. And if I don’t use it, what’s the point of being in the room?

Even if we didn’t know the context, we were instructed to remember that context existed. Everyone on earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.

The punches hurt, even if I understood that they had little to do with who I really was as a person.

America, our moment is now, Barack said. Our moment is now.

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.

We live by the paradigms we know.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?

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.

It felt perverse, how the world just carried on. How everyone was still here, except for my Suzanne.

[Y]ou may live in the world as it is, but you can still work to create the world as it should be.

It makes no sense to me that my gay friends cannot get married to each other because a certain slice of Christianity doesn’t believe in gay marriage.

A marriage is no amusement but a solemn act, and generally a sad one.

I do not like the man who squanders life for fame; give me the man who living makes a name.

As for becoming queen, it was never on the forefront of my mind when I married my husband. It was a long way off, that thought.

I didn’t want to be like all these socialites – they sit at home, and go to the debutant ball, and marry some rich guy and that’s it. That’s all they do. I wanted to do my own thing so I could buy whatever I want, do whatever I want.

I don’t want to be married to someone who feels inferior to my success or because I make more money than he does.

I think people really marry far too much; it is such a lottery after all, and for a poor woman a very doubtful happiness.

I’d imagine my wedding as a fairy tale… huge, beautiful and white.