Barack, I knew, wrestled with what he wanted to do with his life, which direction his career would take. He had an uneasy relationship with wealth. Like me, he’d never had it, and he didn’t aspire to it, either. He wanted to be effective far more than he wanted to be rich but was still trying to figure out how.

— Michelle Obama

Michelle Obama Quotes

I felt the warm tug of the past and the melancholy of absence – all of it a little jarring, accustomed as I was to the hermetic and youthful world of college. It was something deeper than what I normally felt at school, the slow shift of generational gears.

— Michelle Obama

My purpose had always been to see past my neighborhood – to look ahead and overcome.

— Michelle Obama

I couldn’t help but notice who among my friends had more bracelets or Barbies than I did, or who got to buy their clothes at the mall instead of having a mom who sewed everything on the cheap using Butterick patterns at home. 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.

— Michelle Obama

There are simply other ways of being.

— Michelle Obama

I will always wonder about what led so many women in particular to reject an exceptionally qualified female candidate and instead choose a misogynist as their president. The result was now ours to live with.

— Michelle Obama

What I won’t allow myself to do, though, is to become cynical. In my most worried moments, I take a breath and remind myself of the dignity and decency I’ve seen in people throughout my life, the many obstacles that have already been overcome. I hope others will do the same.

— Michelle Obama

The idea was we were to transcend, to get ourselves further. They’d planned for it. They encouraged it. We were expected not just to be smart but to own our smartness – to inhabit it with pride – and this filtered down to how we spoke.

— Michelle Obama

She’d quietly supported every choice I’d ever made. This time, though, she gave me a wry, sideways look, hit her turn signal to get us off the highway and back to our neighborhood, and chuckled just a little. “If you’re asking me,” she said, “I say make the money first and worry about your happiness later.

— Michelle Obama

There’s an age-old maxim in the black community: You’ve got to be twice as good to get half as far.

— Michelle Obama

On my way, I was learning, was the product of Barack’s eternal optimism, an indication of his eagerness to be home that did nothing to signify when he would actually arrive. Almost home was not a geo-locator but rather a state of mind. Sometimes he was on his way but needed to stop in to have one last forty-five-minute conversation with a colleague before he got into the car. Other times, he was almost home but forgot to mention that he was first going to fit in a quick workout at the gym.

— Michelle Obama

I didn’t want the details: I just wanted to know how to feel.

— Michelle Obama

The first thing was that I hated being a lawyer. I wasn’t suited to the work. I felt empty doing it, even if I was plenty good at it. This was a distressing thing to admit, given how hard I’d worked and how in debt I was. 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

Im not loud, I just have a lot to say.

— Michelle Obama

Our afternoons together taught me that there was no formula for motherhood. No single approach could be deemed right or wrong. This was useful to see.

— Michelle Obama

Barack, I knew, wrestled with what he wanted to do with his life, which direction his career would take. He had an uneasy relationship with wealth. Like me, he’d never had it, and he didn’t aspire to it, either. He wanted to be effective far more than he wanted to be rich but was still trying to figure out how.

— Michelle Obama

Barack was now surrounded by people whose job was to treat him like a precious gem. It sometimes felt like a throwback to some lost era...

— Michelle Obama

Optimism reigned in my family’s little apartment on Euclid Avenue. I saw it in my father, in the way he moved around as if nothing were wrong with his body, as if the disease that would someday take his life just didn’t exist.

— Michelle Obama

There was a motto Barack and I tried to live by, and I offered it that night from the stage: When they go low, we go high.

— Michelle Obama

Here’s to Strong Women. May We Know Them. May We Be Them. May We Raise Them.

— Michelle Obama

He saw marriage as the loving alignment of two people who could lead parallel lives but without forgoing any independent dreams or ambitions. 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.

— Michelle Obama
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