BECOMING MICHELLE OBAMA - NOTES FROM THE BOOK

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.

Kids know at a very young age when they are 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. That aren't "bad kids." They are just trying to survive bad circumstances.

Most people were good if you just treated them well.

You never quite knew what other folks saw you to be.

I look back on the discomfort of that moment now and recognize the more universal challenge of squaring who you are with where you come from and where you want to go. I also realize that I was a long way, still, from finding my voice.

You fit every window back into it's frame, it's spring and once again you've made the choice to stay.

College gave me a glimpse of something that had previously been invisible-the apparatus of privilege and connection, what seemed like a network of half-hidden ladders and guide ropes that lay suspended overhead, ready to connect some but not all of us to the sky.

All people have had doubters. Some continue to have roaring, stadium-sized collections of critics and naysayers who will shout 'I told you so' at every little misstep or mistake. The noise doesn't go away, but the most successful people I know have figured out how to live with it, to lean on the people who believe in them, and to push onward with their goals.

I never did stop in on the college counsellor to tell her she'd been wrong-that I was Princeton material after all. It would have done nothing for either of us. And in the end, I hadn't needed to show her anything. I was only showing myself.

There are simply other ways of being.

What's better for us? Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?

The sun stayed wan and weak.

I wanted to grab every last thing I loved and stake it ruthlessly to the ground. I'd known just enough loss by then to know that there was more coming.

There's an age-old Maxim Iin the black community: You've got to be twice as good to get half as far.

I held on to my husband each time, my eyes finding the calm in his. We were still the same seesawing, yin-and-yang duo we'd been for twenty years now and still connected by a visceral and grounding love. This was one thing I was always content to show.

Time seemed to loop and leap, making it feel impossible to measure or track. Each day was packed. The velocity was too great, the time for reflection too limited.

We had more time to further our aims. We could be more patient with our push for progress. We had a sense of the future now, which made me happy.

Kids will invest more when they feel they're being invested in.

It was possible to live on two planes at once, to have one's feet planted in reality but pointed in the direction of progress. You got somewhere by building that better reality, if at first only in your own mind.

There's power in allowing yourself to be known and heard, in owning you unique story, in using you authentic voice. And there's grace in being willing to know and hear others. This, for me, is how we become.