[quotes] Becoming - Michelle Obama 2018

 

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"It was one thing to get yourself out of a stuck place, I realized. It was another thing entirely to try and get the place itself unstuck."

"In Chicago, we'd made the mistake of putting all our hopes for reform on the shoulders of one person without building the political apparatus to support his vision."

"I'd seen just how a handful of votes in every precinct could mean the difference not just between one candidate and another but between one value system and the next. If a few people stayed home in each neighborhood, it could determine what our kids learned in schools, which health-care options we had available, or whether or not we sent our troops to war. Voting was both simple and incredibly effective."

"If you don't get out there and define yourself, you'll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others."

"All we could do then was put our faith into the effort, trusting that with sun and rain and time, something half-decent would push up through the dirt."

"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."

"As he saw it, it was part of his responsibility, what he'd been elected to do - to look rather than look away, to stay upright when the rest of us felt ready to fall down."

"You got somewhere by building that better reality, if at first only in your own mind. Or as Barack had put it that night, you may live in the world as it is, but you can still work to create the world as it should be."

"'being president doesn't change who you are; it reveals who you are.'"

"There's power in allowing yourself to be known and heard, in owning your unique story, in using your authentic voice. And there's grace in willing to know and hear others. This, for me, is how we become."