Becoming Quotes

“As Barack’s adviser, I was meant to act as a social conduit more than anything. My assignment was to make sure he was happy in the job, that he had someone to come to if he needed advice, and that he felt connected to the larger team.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“This is doable, of course—minority and underprivileged students rise to the challenge all the time—but it takes energy. It takes energy to be the only black person in a lecture hall or one of a few nonwhite people trying out for a play or joining an intramural team. It requires effort, an extra level of confidence, to speak in those settings and own your presence in the room.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“I endured misery for the sake of appearances.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“The need to situate someone inside his or her ethnicity and the frustration that comes when it can't be easily done”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“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”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“And it’s there, always, embedded in the hearts of children. Kids wake up each day believing in the goodness of things, in the magic of what might be. They’re uncynical, believers at their core.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“I think what I experienced during those years is what many did—a sense of progress, the comfort of compassion, the joy of watching the unsung and invisible find some light. A glimmer of the world as it could be. This was our bid for permanence: a rising generation that understood what was possible—and that even more was possible for them. Whatever was coming next, this was a story we could own.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“And 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. But the result was now ours to live with.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“What I saw of military life left me humbled. As long as I’d been alive, I’d never encountered the kind of fortitude and loyalty that I found in those rooms. One day in San Antonio, Texas, I noticed a minor commotion in the hallway of the military hospital I was visiting. Nurses shuffled urgently in and out of the room I was about to enter. “He won’t stay in bed,” I heard someone whisper. Inside, I found a broad-shouldered young man from rural Texas who had multiple injuries and whose body had been severely burned. He was in clear agony, tearing off the bedsheets and trying to slide his feet to the floor. It took us all a minute to understand what he was doing. Despite his pain, he was trying to stand up and salute the wife of his commander in chief.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path--the my-isn't-that-impressive path--and keep you there for a long time. Maybe it stops you from swerving, from ever even considering a swerve, because what you risk losing in terms of other people's high regard can feel too costly.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“I owned the fact that I was reaching. Given my background, reaching was really all I could do.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“My husband’s career had allowed me to witness the machinations of politics and power up close. I’d seen how just 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.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“You've leaped but you haven't landed. You can't know yet how the future's going to feel. After months of everything going too fast, time slows to an agonizing crawl.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“I was astonished to see how our leaders treated him only as a threat to their power, inciting mistrust by playing on backward, anti-intellectual ideas about race and class.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“Friendships between women, as any woman will tell you, are built of a thousand small kindnesses”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“He had a simple, buoying faith that if you stuck to your principles, things would work out.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“you may live in the world as it is, but you can still work to create the world as it should be.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“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, Becoming

“She was also deep. It’s what I loved most about Santita. Like me, she could be frivolous and goofy when we were with a larger group, but on our own we’d get ponderous and intense, two”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“We walked to a nearby bar in the same manner we always seemed to walk, with me a step forward and him a step back. Barack was an ambler. He moved with a loose-jointed Hawaiian casualness, never given to hurry, even and especially when instructed to hurry. I, on the other hand, power walked even during my leisure hours and had a hard time decelerating. But I remember how that night I counseled myself to slow down, just a little—just enough so that I could hear what he was saying, because it was beginning to dawn on me that I cared about hearing everything he said.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“Friendships between women, as any woman will tell you, are built of a thousand small kindnesses like these, swapped back and forth and over again.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“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. Regardless of who was living which way and why, every small child in that playroom was cherished and growing just fine.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“They weren’t striving for perfect, but managed somehow to be always excellent,”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“I wasn’t particularly imaginative in how I thought about the future, which is another way of saying I was already thinking about law school.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“I’ve been held up as the most powerful woman in the world and taken down as an “angry black woman.” I’ve wanted to ask my detractors which part of that phrase matters to them the most—is it “angry” or “black” or “woman”?”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“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”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“The important parts of my story, I was realizing, lay less in the surface value of my accomplishments and more in what undergirded them—the many small ways I’d been buttressed over the years, and the people who’d helped build my confidence over time. I remembered them all, every person who’d ever waved me forward, doing his or her best to inoculate me against the slights and indignities I was certain to encounter in the places I was headed—all those environments built primarily for and by people who were neither black nor female. I thought of my great-aunt Robbie and her exacting piano standards, how she’d taught me to lift my chin and play my heart out on a baby grand even if all I’d ever known was an upright with broken keys. I thought of my father, who showed me how to box and throw a football, same as Craig. There were Mr. Martinez and Mr. Bennett, my teachers at Bryn Mawr, who never dismissed my opinions. There was my mom, my staunchest support, whose vigilance had saved me from languishing in a dreary second-grade classroom. At Princeton, I’d had Czerny Brasuell, who encouraged me and fed my intellect in new ways. And as a young professional, I’d had, among others, Susan Sher and Valerie Jarrett—still good friends and colleagues many years later—who showed me what it looked like to be a working mother and consistently opened doors for me, certain I had something to offer. These were people who mostly didn’t know one another and would never have occasion to meet, many of whom I’d fallen out of touch with myself. But for me, they formed a meaningful constellation. These were my boosters, my believers, my own personal gospel choir, singing, Yes, kid, you got this! all the way through. I’d never forgotten it. I’d tried, even as a junior lawyer, to pay it forward, encouraging curiosity when I saw it, drawing younger people into important conversations.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“Everyone on earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“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 being willing to know and hear others. This, for me, is how we become.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“puke green being the official color of the 1970s—”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming