Read an Excerpt
“At fifty-four, I am still in progress, and I hope that I always will be. 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.”
—Becoming, November 2018
“I grew up with a disabled dad in a too-small house with not much money in a starting-to-fail neighborhood, and I also grew up surrounded by love and music in a diverse city in a country where an education can take you far. I had nothing or I had everything. It depends on which way you want to tell it.”
—Becoming, November 2018
“From an early age, [my mom] saw that I had a flame inside me, and she never tempered it. She made sure that I could keep it lit.”
—Instagram, May 12, 2019
“I’m an ordinary person who found herself on an extraordinary journey. In sharing my story, I hope to help create space for other stories and other voices, to widen the pathway for who belongs and why.”
—Becoming, November 2018
“Yeah, I went to Princeton and Harvard, but the lens through which I see the world is the lens that I grew up with. I am the product of a working-class upbringing. I grew up on the South Side of Chicago in a working-class community.”
—“Michelle Obama on Elitism,” The New York Times, April 15, 2008
“In an uncertain world, time-tested values like honesty and integrity, empathy and compassion, that’s the only real currency in life. Treating people right will never, ever fail you.”
—“Dear Class of 2020” Commencement Address, June 7, 2020
“Anger is a powerful force. It can be a useful force, but left on its own, it will only corrode and destroy and sow chaos on the inside and out. But when anger is focused, when it’s channeled into something more, that is the stuff that changes history.”
—“Dear Class of 2020” Commencement Address, June 7, 2020
“I have learned that as long as I hold fast to my beliefs and values and follow my own moral compass, then the only expectations I need to live up to are my own.”
—commencement address at Tuskegee University, May 12, 2015
“A fairer, more just, and more loving world is always possible.”
—Twitter, June 26, 2020
“There had been so many times in my life when I’d found myself the only woman of color—or even the only woman, period—sitting at a conference table or attending a board meeting or mingling at one VIP gathering or another. If I was the first at some of these things, I wanted to make sure that in the end I wasn’t the only—that others were coming up behind me.”
—Becoming, November 2018
“It’s easy to lead by fear. It’s easy to be divisive. It’s easy to make people feel afraid. That’s the easy thing, and it’s also the short-term thing. And for me, what I learned from my husband, what I learned in eight years at the White House is that this life, this world, our responsibility in it, is so much bigger than us.”
—“Oprah’s 2020 Vision Tour Visionaries: Michelle Obama Interview,” February 12, 2020
“I carried a history with me, and it wasn’t that of presidents or First Ladies. I’d never related to the story of John Quincy Adams the way I did to that of Sojourner Truth, or been moved by Woodrow Wilson the way I was by Harriet Tubman. The struggles of Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King were more familiar to me than those of Eleanor Roosevelt or Mamie Eisenhower. I carried their histories, along with those of my mother and grandmothers. . . . I wanted to show up in the world in a way that honored who they were.”
—Becoming, November 2018
