35 Kutipan Inspiratif Buku Becoming Karya Michelle Obama

1. “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

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

3. “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

4. “Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?”― Michelle Obama, Becoming

5. “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

6. “Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own.”― Michelle Obama, Becoming

7. “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

8. “Everyone on Earth, they'd tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.”― Michelle Obama, Becoming

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

10. “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

11. “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

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

13. “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

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

15. “The choice, as he saw it, was this: You give up or you work for change. “What’s better for us?” Barack called to the people gathered in the room. “Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?”― Michelle Obama, Becoming

16. “It’s remarkable how a stereotype functions as an actual trap. How many “angry black women” have been caught in the circular logic of that phrase? When you aren’t being listened to, why wouldn’t you get louder? If you’re written off as angry or emotional, doesn’t that just cause more of the same?”― Michelle Obama, Becoming

17. “Hearing them, I realized that they weren’t at all smarter than the rest of us. They were simply emboldened, floating on an ancient tide of superiority, buoyed by the fact that history had never told them anything different.”― Michelle Obama, Becoming

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

19. “This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path—the my-isn’t-that-impressive path—and keep you there for a long time.”― Michelle Obama, Becoming

20. “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.”― Michelle Obama, Becoming

21. “I began to understand that his version of hope reached far beyond mine: It was one thing to get yourself out of a stick place, I realized. It was another thing entirely to try and get the place itself unstuck.”― Michelle Obama, Becoming

22. “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

23. “The easiest way to disregard a woman’s voice is to package her as a scold.”― Michelle Obama, Becoming

24. “Hearing them, I realised that they weren't all at smarter than the rest of us. They were simply emboldened, floating on an ancient tide of superiority, buoyed by the fact that history had never told them anything different.”― Michelle Obama, Becoming

25. “It’s all a process, steps along a path. Becoming requires equal parts patience and rigor. Becoming is never giving up on the idea that there’s more growing to be done.”― Michelle Obama, Becoming

26. “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

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

28. “I wasn’t going to let one person’s opinion dislodge everything I thought I knew about myself. Instead, I switched my method without changing my goal.”― Michelle Obama, Becoming

29. “Here’s a memory, which like most memories is imperfect and subjective—collected long ago like a beach pebble and slipped into the pocket of my mind.”― Michelle Obama, Becoming

30. “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

31. “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

32. “It was painful, but time pushed us all forward.”― Michelle Obama, Becoming

33. “Let’s invite one another in. Maybe then we can begin to fear less, to make fewer wrong assumptions, to let go of the biases and stereotypes that unnecessarily divide us. Maybe we can better embrace the ways we are the same. It’s not about being perfect. It’s not about where you get yourself in the end. There’s power in allowing yourself to be known and heard, in owning your unique story, in using your authentic voice. And there’s grace in being willing to know and hear others. This, for me, is how we become.”― Michelle Obama, Becoming

34. “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

35. “We live by the paradigms we know.”― Michelle Obama, Becoming