Top 450 Michelle Obama Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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.”

— Michelle Obama

402. “This was not me and never would be. I could be supportive, but I couldn’t be a robot.”

— Michelle Obama

403. “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

404. “I knew I was no smarter than any of them. I just had the advantage of an advocate. I thought about this more often now that I was an adult, especially when people applauded me for my achievements, as if there weren’t a strange and cruel randomness to it all. Through no fault of their own, those second graders had lost a year of learning. I’d seen enough at this point to understand how quickly even small deficits can snowball, too.”

— Michelle Obama

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

— Michelle Obama

406. “When voters got to see me as a person, they understood that the caricatures were untrue. I’ve learned that it’s harder to hate up close.”

— Michelle Obama

407. “They’re not special at all. The South Side is filled with kids like that.”

— Michelle Obama

408. “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

409. “In the presence of his certainty, his notion that he could make some sort of difference in the world, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit lost by comparison. His sense of purpose seemed like an unwitting challenge to my own.”

— Michelle Obama

410. “If anyone in our family wanted to step outside onto the Truman Balcony – the lovely arcing terrace that overlooked the South Lawn, and the only semiprivate outdoor space we had at the White House – we needed to first alert the Secret Service so that they could shut down the section of E Street that was in view of the balcony, clearing out the flocks of tourists who gathered outside the gates there at all hours of the day and night.”

— Michelle Obama

411. “What I love about design is the artistic and scientific complexity that also becomes useful...”

— Michelle Obama

412. “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

413. “I can hurt you and get away with it. 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.”

— Michelle Obama

414. “I also learned that being rich didn’t protect you from failure.”

— Michelle Obama

415. “Two months later, just weeks before the election, a tape would surface of Donald Trump in an ungaurded moment, bragging to a TV host in 2005 about sexually assaulting women, using language so lewd and vulgar that it put media outlets in a quandary about how to quote it without violating the established stamdards of decency. In the end, the standards of decency were simply lowered in order to make room for the candidate’s voice.”

— Michelle Obama

416. “Our hurts become our fears. Our fears become our limits.”

— Michelle Obama

417. “I offered testament to the idea that it was possible, at least in some ways, to overcome invisibility.”

— Michelle Obama

418. “When you’re beginning something new, you can’t always see where you’re headed with it. You have to be okay with not knowing exactly how things will turn out.”

— Michelle Obama

419. “But as I’ve said, failure is a feeling long before it’s an actual result.”

— Michelle Obama

420. “If I point to anything that makes me who I am, it’s that I have a whole lot of common sense. I’ve got a good mind and a good ability to read people and situations.”

— Michelle Obama

421. “Three times over the course of the fall of 2011, Barack proposed bills that would create thousands of jobs for Americans, in part by giving states money to hire more teachers and first responders. Three times the Republicans blocked them, never even allowing a vote.”

— Michelle Obama

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

— Michelle Obama

423. “I owned the fact that I was reaching. Given my background, reaching was really all I could do.”

— Michelle Obama

424. “That’s what tools are for. They help keep us upright and balanced, better able to coexist with uncertainty. They help us deal with flux, to manage when life feels out of control. And they help us continue onward, even while in discomfort, even as we live with our strands exposed.”

— Michelle Obama

425. “It felt perverse, how the world just carried on. How everyone was still here, except for my Suzanne.”

— Michelle Obama

426. “The challenge in leading a big life becomes trying to find ways to protect your dreams and your drive, to remain tough without being overly guarded, to stay nimble and open to growth, allowing others to see you for who you are. It’s about learning how to shelter your flame without hiding its light.”

— Michelle Obama

427. “Because what was a basketball game if not a showcase of boys?”

— Michelle Obama

428. “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

429. “It was as if he’d surrendered a part of himself as a way of coping.”

— Michelle Obama

430. “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. It was time to make a move.”

— Michelle Obama

431. “I’d said it casually, but the phrase caught hold and was amplified across the press. Some Americans seemed to embrace it, understanding all too well the amount of organization and drive it takes to raise children. Others, meanwhile, seemed vaguely appalled, presuming it to mean that as First Lady I’d do nothing but pipe-cleaner craft projects with my kids.”

— Michelle Obama

432. “When I was younger, I could eat whatever I wanted, as long as I exercised; or if I didn’t exercise and just watched what I ate, I’d maintain. Now I have to do both.”

— Michelle Obama

433. “We understood, in other words, how ridiculously fortunate we were, and we both felt an obligation not to be complacent.”

— Michelle Obama

434. “The last commencement I attended that spring was personal – Malia’s graduation from Sidwell Friends, held on a warm day in June.”

— Michelle Obama

435. “Being busy is a kind of tool this way. It’s like giving yourself a suit of armor to wear: If someone’s shooting arrows in your direction, you’re less likely to register any hits. There simply isn’t time.”

— Michelle Obama

436. “It’s a sensation I’ve come to love as I’ve traveled more, the way a new place signals itself instantly and without pretense. The air has a different weight from what you’re used to; it carries smells you can’t quite identify, a faint whiff of wood smoke or diesel fuel, maybe, or the sweetness of something blooming in the trees. The same sun comes up, but looking slightly different from what you know.”

— Michelle Obama

437. “Almost from the minute we agreed it would be ok for him to run, Barack became a kind of human blur, a pixelated version of the guy I knew-.”

— Michelle Obama

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

— Michelle Obama

439. “Life has shown me that strong friendships are most often the result of strong intentions. Your table needs to be deliberately built, deliberately populated, and deliberately tended to.”

— Michelle Obama

440. “I mean, hope doesn’t get actualized in three and a half years. If that were the case, we’d be out of luck as a country.”

— Michelle Obama

441. “How do we build places where gladness lives – for ourselves and for others, and most especially for children – and to which we will always want to return?”

— Michelle Obama

442. “I would be depressed if I felt I could never eat the things that I love. I also don’t want my girls to be obsessed about food.”

— Michelle Obama

443. “Barack was now surrounded by people whose job was to treat him like a precious gem. It sometimes felt like a throwback to some lost era...”

— Michelle Obama

444. “That day, I stared for a few extra seconds at the little oblong bubble next to my husband’s name for president of the United States. After almost twenty-one months of campaigning, attacks, and exhaustion, this was it – the last thing I needed to do. Barack glanced my way and laughed. “You still trying to make up your mind?” he said. “Need a little more time?”

— Michelle Obama

445. “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

446. “If you’ve never passed a winter in Chicago, let me describe it: You can live for a hundred straight days beneath an iron-gray sky that claps itself like a lid over the city. Frigid, biting winds blow in off the lake. Snow falls in dozens of ways, in heavy overnight dumps and daytime, sideways squalls, in demoralizing sloppy sleet and fairy-tale billows of fluff. There’s ice, usually, lots of it, that shellacs the sidewalks and windshields that then need to be scraped.”

— Michelle Obama

447. “When I thought I had a good idea about something, I didn’t like being told no.”

— Michelle Obama

448. “To me, there was magic in the learning.”

— Michelle Obama

449. “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

450. “There’s nothing easy about finding your way through a world loaded with obstacles that others can’t or don’t see. When you are different, you can feel as if you’re operating with a different map, a different set of navigational challenges, than those around you. Sometimes, you feel like you have no map at all. Your differentness will often precede you into a room; people see it before they see you. Which leaves you with the task of overcoming.”

— Michelle Obama