Becoming Quotes

“Barack, I’ve come to understand, is the sort of person who needs a hole, a closed-off little warren where he can read and write undisturbed. It’s like a hatch that opens directly onto the spacious skies of his brain. Time spent there seems to fuel him.”
― 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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“Grief and resilience live together. I learned this not just once as First Lady but many times over.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“I considered all these people, current and former staff, to be family. And I was so proud of what we’d done.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“Unspoken was the fact that he could just go. He could walk out the door and catch a cab to the airport and still make it to Springfield in time to vote. He could leave his sick daughter and fretting wife halfway across the Pacific and go join his colleagues. It was an option. But I wasn’t going to martyr myself by suggesting it.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“What struck me was how assured he seemed of his own direction in life. He was oddly free from doubt, though at first glance it was hard to understand why.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“He was not like anyone I'd dated before, mainly because he seemed so secure. He was openly affectionate. He told me I was beautiful. He made me feel good.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“My grandfather, also named Fraser Robinson, was decidedly less fun to be around, a cigar-puffing patriarch who’d sit in his recliner with a newspaper open on his lap and the evening news blaring on the television nearby. His demeanor was nothing like my father’s. For Dandy, everything was an irritant. He was galled by the day’s headlines, by the state of the world as shown on TV, by the young black men—“boo-boos,” he called them—whom he perceived to be hanging uselessly around the neighborhood, giving black people everywhere a bad name. He shouted at the television. He shouted at my grandmother, a sweet, soft-spoken woman and devout Christian named LaVaughn. (My parents had named me Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, in honor of her.) By day, my grandmother expertly managed a thriving Bible bookstore on the Far South Side, but in her off-hours with Dandy she was reduced to a meekness I found perplexing, even as a young girl. She cooked his meals and absorbed his barrage of complaints and said nothing in her own defense. Even at a young age, there was something about my grandmother’s silence and passivity in her relationship with Dandy that got under my skin. According to my mother, I was the only person in the family to talk back to Dandy when he yelled. I did it regularly, from the time I was very young and over many years, in part because it drove me crazy that my grandmother wouldn’t speak up for herself, in part because everyone else fell silent around him, and lastly because I loved Dandy as much as he confounded me. His stubbornness was something I recognized, something I’d inherited myself, though I hoped in a less abrasive form.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“My team and I persuaded Darden Restaurants, the parent company behind chains like Olive Garden and Red Lobster, to make changes to the kinds of food it offered and how it was prepared. They pledged to revamp their menus, cutting calories, reducing sodium, and offering healthier options for kids’ meals.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“After returning from Bali, Barack had spent more than a year writing a second draft of his book during the hours he wasn’t at one of his jobs. He worked late at night in a small room we’d converted to a study at the rear of our apartment—a crowded, book-strewn bunker I referred to lovingly as the Hole. I’d sometimes go in, stepping over his piles of paper to sit on the ottoman in front of his chair while he worked, trying to lasso him with a joke and a smile, to tease him back from whatever far-off fields he’d been galloping through. He was good-humored about my intrusions, but only if I didn’t stay too long.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“America would bring to Barack Obama the same questions my cousin was unconsciously putting to me that day on the stoop: Are you what you appear to be? Do I trust you or not?”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“Even standing on the far edge of the vortex, you still felt its spin.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“...our stories connected us to one another, and through those connections, it was possible to harness discontent and convert it to something useful.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“Ahora comprendo que incluso un matrimonio feliz puede ser agotador, que es un contrato que debe renovarse una y otra vez, discreta y calladamente, o incluso a solas.”
― Michelle Obama, Mi historia

“the burden of assimilation is put largely on the shoulders of minority students. In my experience, it’s a lot to ask. At Princeton, I needed my black friends.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“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.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“Because what was a basketball game if not a showcase of boys?”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“You don’t know that when a memo arrives to confirm the assignment, some deep and unseen fault line in your life has begun to tremble, that some hold is already starting to slip.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“Barack was a black man in America, after all. I didn’t really think he could win.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“Barack’s safety was something I didn’t want to think about, let alone discuss.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“I spent much of 2008 trying not to worry about the punches.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“The last commencement I attended that spring was personal—Malia’s graduation from Sidwell Friends, held on a warm day in June.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming