Becoming Quotes

The best quotes by the author we have brought to you

“A happy marriage can be a vexation, that it’s a contract best renewed and renewed again, even quietly and privately, even alone.” (Becoming Quotes)
Michelle Obama
Becoming

“America is not a simple place. Its contradictions set me spinning. I’d found myself at Democratic fund-raisers held in vast Manhattan penthouses, sipping wine with wealthy women who would claim to be passionate about education and children’s issues and then lean in conspiratorially to tell me that their Wall Street husbands would never vote for anyone who even thought about raising their taxes.”
Michelle Obama
Becoming

“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
Becoming

“At fifty-four, I am still in progress, and I hope that I always will be.”
Michelle Obama
Becoming

“Barack had a smile that seemed to stretch the whole width of his face. He was a deadly combination of smooth and reasonable.”
Michelle Obama
Becoming

“Bullies were scared people hiding inside scary people.”
Michelle Obama
Becoming

“Dominance, even the threat of it, is a form of dehumanization. It’s the ugliest kind of power.”
Michelle Obama
Becoming

“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.”
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

“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.”
Michelle Obama
Becoming

“For me, becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self. The journey doesn’t end.”
Michelle Obama
Becoming

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

“His money went largely toward books, which to him were like sacred objects, providing ballast for his mind.”
Michelle Obama
Becoming

“I didn’t want them ever to believe that life began when the man of the house arrived home. We didn’t wait for Dad. It was his job now to catch up with us.”
Michelle Obama
Becoming

“I knew from my own life experience that when someone shows genuine interest in your learning and development, even if only for ten minutes in a busy day, it matters. It matters especially for women, for minorities, for anyone society is quick to overlook.”
Michelle Obama
Becoming

“I understand now that even a happy marriage can be a vexation, that it’s a contract best renewed and renewed again, even quietly and privately.”
Michelle Obama
Becoming

“I was deeply, delightfully in love with a guy whose forceful intellect and ambition could possibly end up swallowing mine.”
Michelle Obama
Becoming

“I was someone who liked things to be neat and planned in advance, and from what I could tell, there seemed to be nothing especially neat about a life in politics.”
Michelle Obama
Becoming

“If you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others.”
Michelle Obama
Becoming

“Inspiration on its own was shallow; you had to back it up with hard work.”
Michelle Obama
Becoming

“Life is short and not to be wasted. If I died, I didn’t want people remembering me for the stacks of legal briefs I’d written or the corporate trademarks I’d helped defend. I felt certain that I had something more to offer the world.”
Michelle Obama
Becoming

“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.”
Michelle Obama
Becoming

“Life with Barack would never be dull. I knew it even then. It would be some version of banana yellow and slightly hair-raising. It occurred to me, too, that quite possibly the man would never make any money.”
Michelle Obama
Becoming

“Listening to Barack, I began to understand that his version of hope reached far beyond mine: 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.”
Michelle Obama
Becoming

“Now I think 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

“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
Becoming

“People ask what it’s like to live in the White House. I sometimes say that it’s a bit like what I imagine living in a fancy hotel might be like, only the fancy hotel has no other guests in it – just you and your family.”
Michelle Obama
Becoming

“Running for president, I understand now, is an all-consuming, full-body effort for every person involved, and good campaigns tend to involve a stage-setting, groundwork-laying preamble, which can add whole years to the effort.”
Michelle Obama
Becoming

“The more popular you became, the more haters you acquired. It seemed almost like an unwritten rule, especially in politics, where adversaries put money into opposition research – hiring investigators to crawl through every piece of a candidate’s background, looking for anything resembling dirt.”
Michelle Obama
Becoming

“The White House, one learns, operates with the express purpose of optimizing the well-being, efficiency, and overall power of one person – and that’s the president.”
Michelle Obama
Becoming

“This I know for sure about my husband: You don’t dangle an opportunity in front of him, something that could give him a wider field of impact, and expect him just to walk away. Because he doesn’t. He won’t.”
Michelle Obama
Becoming

“Time, as far as my father was concerned, was a gift you gave to other people.”
Michelle Obama
Becoming

“We all play a role in this democracy. We need to remember the power of every vote. I continue, too, to keep myself connected to a force that’s larger and more potent than any one election, or leader, or news story and that’s optimism. For me, this is a form of faith, an antidote to fear.”
Michelle Obama
Becoming

“We were planting seeds of change, the fruit of which we might never see. We had to be patient.”
Michelle Obama
Becoming

“When there’s a baby in the house, time stretches and contracts, abiding by none of the regular rules. A single day can feel endless, and then suddenly six months have blown right past.”
Michelle Obama
Becoming

“Women endure entire lifetimes of these indignities in the form of catcalls, groping, assault, oppression. These things injure us. They sap our strength. Some of the cuts are so small they’re barely visible. Others are huge and gaping, leaving scars that never heal. Either way, they accumulate. We carry them everywhere, to and from school and work, at home while raising our children, at our places of worship, anytime we try to advance.”
Michelle Obama
Becoming