“I just wanted to achieve. Or maybe I didn’t want to be dismissed as incapable of achievement.”

It’s easier to hold onto your own stereotypes and misconceptions, it makes you feel justified in your own ignorance. That’s America. So the challenge for us is, are we ready for change?

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.

there’s no straight line between effort and reward.

You find ways to adapt. If you’re in it forever, there’s really no choice.

No one, I realized, was going to look out for me unless I pushed for it.

My daughters are the heart of my heart and the center of my world.

Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result

Fulfillment, I’m sure, struck her as a rich person’s conceit.

As a kid, you learn to measure long before you understand the size or value of anything. Eventually, if you’re lucky, you learn that you’ve been measuring all wrong.

Friendships between women, as any woman will tell you, are built of a thousand small kindnesses, swapped back and forth and over again.

It was painful, but time pushed us all forward.

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?

You can’t make decisions based on fear and the possibility of what might happen.

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.

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.

The burden of assimilation is put largely on the shoulders of minority students.

Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.

Forbearance in the face of fate, beauty constant under torture, are not merely passive. They are a positive achievement, an explicit triumph.

I never thought of becoming an actress, but I always dreamt of winning a beauty pageant, and I achieved that.

In order for me to achieve… I had to regard myself greater than what I was. In other words I had to fake it until I make it.

The future is not a gift: it is an achievement. Every generation helps make its own future. This is the essential challenge of the present.

Physical fitness is extremely important to me. Only if you are fit will you be able to achieve whatever you want to achieve in life; you will be able to pursue your dreams, your ambition, you goals, and the things you love.

Illiteracy must be banished from the land if we shall attain that high destiny as the foremost of the enlightened nations of the world which, under Providence, we ought to achieve.

There’s nothing better than achieving your goals, whatever they might be.