It was a small but life-changing move. I didn’t stop to ask myself then what would happen to all the kids who’d been left in the basement with the teacher who couldn’t teach. 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

Michelle Obama Quotes

There’s something innately bolstering about a person who sees his opportunities as endless, who doesn’t waste time or energy questioning whether they will ever dry up.

— Michelle Obama

I’d allowed myself to get trapped in my own head.

— Michelle Obama

If you’ve never passed a winter in Chicago, let me describe it: You can live for a hundred straight days beneath an iron-gray sky that claps itself like a lid over the city. Frigid, biting winds blow in off the lake. Snow falls in dozens of ways, in heavy overnight dumps and daytime, sideways squalls, in demoralizing sloppy sleet and fairy-tale billows of fluff. There’s ice, usually, lots of it, that shellacs the sidewalks and windshields that then need to be scraped.

— Michelle Obama

If you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others. I wasn’t interested in slotting myself into a passive role, waiting for Barack’s team to give me direction.

— Michelle Obama

They aren’t “bad kids.” They’re just trying to survive bad circumstances.

— Michelle Obama

Part-time work was meant to give me more freedom, but mostly it left me feeling as if I were only half doing everything, that all the lines in my life had been blurred.

— Michelle Obama

If you tap into your true story, and share that truth, it resonates with people.

— Michelle Obama

Education had been the primary instrument of change in my own life, my lever upward in the world.

— Michelle Obama

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
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