Success isn’t about how much money you make. It’s about the difference you make in people’s lives.
No country can ever truly flourish if it stifles the potential of its women and deprives itself of the contributions of half of its citizens.
As women, we must stand up for ourselves. We must stand up for each other. We must stand up for justice for all.
There is no magic to achievement. It’s really about hard work, choices, and persistence.
Now I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child – 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.
If you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others.
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.
Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?
Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result. It’s vulnerability that breeds with self-doubt and then is escalated, often deliberately, by fear.
Everyone on Earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.
Friendships between women, as any woman will tell you, are built of a thousand small kindnesses... swapped back and forth and over again.
Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own.
It hurts to live after someone has died. It just does. It can hurt to walk down a hallway or open the fridge. It hurts to put on a pair of socks, to brush your teeth. Food tastes like nothing. Colors go flat. Music hurts, and so do memories. You look at something you’d otherwise find beautiful – a purple sky at sunset or a playground full of kids – and it only somehow deepens the loss. Grief is so lonely this way.
Time, as far as my father was concerned, was a gift you gave to other people.
Women endure entire lifetimes of these indignities – in the form of catcalls, groping, assault, oppression. These things injure us. They sap our strength. Some of the cuts are so small they’re barely visible. Others are huge and gaping, leaving scars that never heal. Either way, they accumulate. We carry them everywhere, to and from school and work, at home while raising our children, at our places of worship, anytime we try to advance.
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.
When they go low, we go high.
His money went largely toward books, which to him were like sacred objects, providing ballast for his mind.
At fifty-four, I am still in progress, and I hope that I always will be.
The choice, as he saw it, was this: You give up or you work for change. “What’s better for us?” Barack called to the people gathered in the room. “Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?