903 Quotes by Michelle Obama


  • Author Michelle Obama
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    There are portraits of me and Barack now hanging in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, a fact that humbles us both. I doubt that anyone looking at our two childhoods, our circumstances, would ever have predicted we'd land in those halls. The paintings are lovely, but what matters most is that they're there for young people to see - that our faces help dismantle the perception that in order to be enshrined in history, you have to look a certain way.

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  • Author Michelle Obama
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    One proving ground only opened onto the next. Such is the life of a girl who can't stop wondering, Am I good enough? and is still trying to show herself the answer.

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  • Author Michelle Obama
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    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.

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  • Author Michelle Obama
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    Twenty minutes later, I caught sight of Barack across the room, in the grips of what looked to be an endless conversation with the woman, who was doing a large portion of the talking. He shot me a look, implying that he’d like to be rescued. But he was a grown man. I let him rescue himself.

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  • Author Michelle Obama
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    It was possible, I knew, to live on two planes at once - to have one's feet planted in reality but pointed in the direction of progress. It was what I had done as a kid on Euclid Avenue, what my family - and marginalized people more generally - had always done. You get 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.

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  • Author Michelle Obama
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    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.

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