The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“A successful partnership is like a winning basketball team made up of two deaf individuals with fully developed and interchangeable sets of skills. Each player has to know not just how to shoot but also how to dribble, pass and defend. That doesn’t mean there aren’t weaknesses or differences you will compensate for in each other. It’s just that together you’ll have to cover the full court keeping yourselves versatile over time. A partnership doesn’t actually change who you are even as it challenges you to be accommodating of another person’s needs… The change is in what is between us, the million small adjustments, compromises and sacrifices, we’ve each made in order to accommodate the close presence of the other.” (The Light We Carry Quotes)
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“Any time we grip hands with another soul and recognize some piece of the story they’re trying to tell, we are acknowledging and affirming two truths at once: We’re lonely and yet we’re not alone.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“Any time your circumstances start to feel all-consuming, I suggest you try going in the other direction—toward the small. Look for something that’ll help rearrange your thoughts, a pocket of contentedness where you can live for a while. And by this I don’t mean sitting passively in front of your television or scrolling through your phone. Find something that’s active, something that asks for your mind but uses your body as well. Immerse yourself in a process. And forgive yourself for temporarily ducking out of the storm.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“As we saw in the 2016 election, it can be presumptuous to assume everything will work out in your favor, and dangerous to leave your fate entirely in the hands of others when it comes to choosing your leaders. We have to make hopeful choices, to commit and recommit to the work involved.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“At the same time I was waking up to the fact that there were gender dynamics at play—that the girls I envied were underdogs, too. Even small, even classically pretty, they were operating within a narrowed set of choices.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“Because here’s the thing: Emotions are not plans. They don’t solve problems or right any wrongs. You can feel them—you will feel them, inevitably—but be careful about letting them guide you. Rage can be a dirty windshield. Hurt is like a broken steering wheel. Disappointment will only ride, sulking and unhelpful, in the back seat. If you don’t do something constructive with them, they’ll take you straight into a ditch. My power has always hinged on my ability to keep myself out of the ditch.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“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
The Light We Carry
“Being different conditions you toward cautiousness, even as it demands that you be bold.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“But the thing is, when someone does light up for us, we remember it. The feeling lands. I can still summon the warmth I felt from my third-grade teacher, Miss Seals, who seemed genuinely happy to see her students each day.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“By her own measure, my mom is nothing special. She also likes to say that while she loves us dearly, my brother and I are not special, either. We’re just two kids who had enough love and a good amount of luck and happened to do well as a result. She tries to remind people that neighborhoods like the South Side of Chicago are packed full of “little Michelles and little Craigs.” They’re in every school, on every block. It’s just that too many of them get overlooked and underestimated, so too much of that potential goes unrecognized. This would probably count as the foundational point of my mom’s larger philosophy: “All children are great children.” (The Light We Carry Quotes)
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“Diffuse and perhaps even more powerful for its ability to agitate our nerves even when there’s no immediate threat, when we are only imagining how things might possibly go wrong, afraid of what could be.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“Find one thing you can actively complete and give yourself over to it, even if it is of no immediate benefit to anybody but yourself. Maybe you spend an afternoon wallpapering your bathroom, or baking bread, or doing nail art, or making jewelry. It could be two hours spent meticulously producing your mom’s fried chicken recipe, or ten hours building a miniature replica of Notre Dame Cathedral in your basement. Allow yourself the gift of absorption.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“For me, going high usually involves taking a pause before I react. It is a form of self-control, a line laid between our best and worst impulses. Going high is about resisting the temptation to participate in shallow fury and corrosive contempt and instead figuring out how to respond with a clear voice to whatever is shallow and corrosive around you. It’s what happens when you take a reaction and mature it into a response.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“Friends will come and go, taking on more or less importance as you move through different phases of life. You may have a small group of friends, or just a few one-on-one friendships. All of that is okay. What matters most is the quality of your relationships. It’s good to be discerning about who you trust, who you bring close. With new relationships, I find myself quietly assessing whether I feel safe and whether, inside the context of a budding friendship, I feel seen and appreciated for who I am. With our friends, we are always looking for very simple reassurances that we matter, that our light is recognized and our voice is heard—and we owe our friends the same. I want to say, too, that it’s okay to step back from or downsize a difficult friendship. Sometimes we have to let certain friends go, or at least diminish our reliance on them. ”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“Go forth with a spoonful of fear and return with a wagonful of competence.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“Going high is a commitment, and not a particularly glamorous one, to keep moving forward. It only works when we do the work.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“Going high is about learning to keep the poison out and the power in. It means that you have to be judicious with your energy and clear in your convictions. You push ahead in some instances and pull back in others, giving yourself opportunities to rest and restore. It helps to recognize that you are operating on a budget, as all of us are. When it comes to our attention, our time, our credibility, our goodwill toward and from others, we work with a limited but renewable set of resources.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“Going high is work—often hard, often tedious, often inconvenient, and often bruising. You will need to disregard the haters and the doubters. You will need to build some walls between yourself and those who would prefer to see you fail. And you will need to keep working when others around you may have grown tired or cynical and given up.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“He helped me remember that anxiety was a natural part of doing something new and big.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“He just used solid information as a means of unbundling the threat and giving me tools to stay safe.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“He never told me to get over my fear, nor did he dismiss it as irrational or dumb. He just used solid information as a means of unbundling the threat and giving me tools to stay safe.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“How you view yourself becomes everything. It’s your foundation, the starting point for changing the world around you.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“I believe that each of us carries a bit of inner brightness, something entirely unique and individual. A flame that’s worth protecting. When we are able to recognize our own light, we become empowered to use it. When we learn to foster what’s unique in the people around us, we become better able to build compassionate communities and make meaningful change.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“I guess you could say that I grew up focused exactly that way, aimed toward a life of sock buying rather than sock mending.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“I lean on each individual at different times and in different ways. Which is another thing worth recognizing about friendship. No one person, no one relationship will fulfill your every need. Not every friend can offer you safety or support on every day. Not every one can or will show up precisely when or how you need them to. And this is why it’s good to continue always making room at your table, to keep yourself open to gathering more friends. You will never not need them, and you will never stop learning from them.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“I often say that it’s much harder to hate up close.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“I’ve come to understand that sometimes the big stuff becomes easier to handle when you deliberately put something small alongside it. When everything starts to feel big and therefore scary and insurmountable, when I hit a point of feeling or thinking or seeing too much, I’ve learned to make the choice to go toward the small.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“I’ve progressed only slowly to where I am today. If you are a young person reading this, please remember to be patient with yourself. You are at the beginning of a long and interesting journey, one that will not always be comfortable. You will spend years gathering data about who you are and how you operate and only slowly will you find your way towards more certainty and a stronger sense of self. Only gradually will you begin to discover and use your light!” (The Light We Carry Quotes)
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“If you choose to try to make a life with another person, you will live by that choice. You’d find yourself having to choose again and again to remain rather than run. It helps if you enter into a committed relationship prepared to work, ready to be humbled and willing to accept and even enjoy living in that in-between space, bouncing between the poles of beautiful and horrible, sometimes in the span of a single conversation, sometimes over the course of years. And inside of that choice and those years you’ll almost certainly come to see that there is no such thing as a 50-50 balance, instead it will be like beads on an abacus, sliding back and forth, the maths rarely tidy, the equation never quite solved….”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“In all my decades of staying busy, I had always presumed that my head was fully in charge of everything, including telling my hands what to do. It hadn’t really ever occurred to me to let things flow the opposite way. But that’s what knitting did. It reversed the flow. It buckled my churning brain into the back seat and allowed my hands to drive the car for a while. It detoured me away from my anxiety, just enough to provide some relief.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“In trying to spare yourself the worry and discomfort of taking a risk, you’re potentially costing yourself an opportunity. In clinging only to what you know, you are making your world small. You are robbing yourself of chances to grow.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“Inside of uncertainty? What tools do we have to sustain ourselves? Where do we find extra pillars of support? How can we create safety and stability for others? And if we work as one, what might we manage to overcome together?”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“It remains a damning fact of life that we ask too much of those who are marginalized and too little of those who are not.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“It should go without saying that not every tool helps in every situation, or uniformly for every person. What’s sturdy and effective for you may not be what’s sturdy and effective in the hands of your boss, or your mother, or your life partner. A spatula won’t help you change a flat tire; a tire iron won’t help you fry an egg. (Though by all means, feel free to prove me wrong.) Tools evolve over time, based on our circumstances and growth. What works in one phase of life may not work in another. But I do believe that there’s value in learning to identify the habits that keep us centered and grounded versus those that trigger anxiety or feed our insecurities.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“It wasn’t that they couldn’t. It was just that they didn’t. It’s likely they never even gave it a thought.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“It’s okay to pace yourself, get a little rest, and speak of your struggles out loud. It’s okay to prioritize your wellness.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“I’ve progressed only slowly to where I am today. If you are a young person reading this, please remember to be patient with yourself. You are at the beginning of a long and interesting journey, one that will not always be comfortable. You will spend years gathering data about who you are and how you operate and only slowly will you find your way towards more certainty and a stronger sense of self. Only gradually will you begin to discover and use your light!”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“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
The Light We Carry
“Most of what I’m describing here is abstract fear—fear of embarrassment or fear of rejection, worries that things will go wrong or someone will get hurt. What I’ve come to realize, too, is that jeopardy is woven into the experience of being human, regardless of who you are, what you look like, or where you live. We may encounter it in different ways and with different stakes, but not one of us is immune. Consider that the Oxford English Dictionary defines “jeopardy” as danger of loss, harm, or failure. Who among us isn’t walking around fully attuned to those dangers?”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“My mom says that you should grant kids your trust rather than making them earn it. This is her version of “starting kind.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“New friends tended to pop up like daisies in my life, and I made the effort to cultivate them. If I encountered someone who seemed interesting, whether at work, or a holiday party, or a hair salon, or, as was increasingly the case, through my children and their activities, I usually made a point of following up, getting that person’s phone number or email address, proposing that we grab lunch sometime or meet up at a playground.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“Nothing can dim the light that shines from within.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“One light feeds another. One strong family lends strength to more. One engaged community can ignite those around it. This is the power of the light we carry.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“One of the greatest lessons life has taught me is that adaptability and preparedness are paradoxically linked. For me, preparedness is part of the armor I wear. I plan, rehearse, and do my homework ahead of anything that feels even remotely like a test. This helps me to operate with more calm under stressful circumstances, knowing I will most often, regardless of what happens, find some pathway through. Being organized and prepared helps keep the floor feeling more solid beneath my feet.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“Our differences are treasures and they’re also tools. They are useful, valid, worthy, and important to share. Recognizing this, not only in ourselves but in the people around us, we begin to rewrite more and more stories of not-mattering. We start to change the paradigms around who belongs, creating more space for more people. Step by step by step, we can lessen the loneliness of not-belonging.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“Our hurts become our fears. Our fears become our limits. For many of us, this can be a heavy inheritance, carried by generations. It’s a lot to try to push back against, to try to unlearn.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“Read books by people whose perspective is different from yours, listen to voices you haven’t heard before, look for narratives that are new to you. In them and with them, you might end up finding more room for yourself.” (The Light We Carry Quotes)
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“Real-world connections most often tend to cut against stereotypes. They can be remarkably calming, in fact—a small but potent way to reset a bad mood or challenge broader feelings of mistrust. The only thing is that in order to get there, you do first need to lay down your shield.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“Sometimes you recognize a tool only after it starts working for you. And sometimes, it turns out, the smallest of tools can help us to sort through the largest of feelings. I learned this a couple of years ago when I mail-ordered myself some knitting needles without quite realizing what I needed them for.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“Speak often with those who struggle with a sense of differentness, who feel undervalued or invisible, drained by their efforts to overcome, feeling that their light has been dimmed. I have met young people from all over the world who are trying to find their voice and create space for their most authentic selves inside their relationships and their workplaces. They are full of questions: How do I create meaningful connections?”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“Stay vigorous and faithful, humble and empathetic. Tell the truth, do your best by others, keep perspective, understand history and context. Stay prudent, stay tough, and stay outraged.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“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
The Light We Carry
“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
The Light We Carry
“The choices we make when feeling afraid, I believe, often determine the larger outcomes in our lives.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“The goal, instead, is to find someone who will do the work with you, not for you, contributing on all fronts and in all ways.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“The notion of going high shouldn’t raise any questions about whether we are obligated to fight for more fairness, decency, and justice in this world; rather, it’s about how we fight, how we go about trying.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“The only love story I know, is the one I happen to live inside everyday. Your path towards certainty, if that’s even what you’re after, will look different from mine. Just as your conception of home and who belongs there with you, will always be unique to you. Only slowly do most of us figure out what we need in intimate relationships and what we’re able to give to them. We practice, we learn, we mess up. We sometimes acquire tools that don’t actually serve us. …we obsess, overthink and misplace our energy…we retreat when hurt, we armor up when scared, we might attack when provoked, or yield when ashamed.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“The thick-skin part means learning what to do with your rage and your hurt, where to put it, how to convert it into actual power.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“The unknown is where possibility glitters.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“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
The Light We Carry
“There’s nothing easy about finding your way through a world loaded with obstacles that others can’t or don’t see.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“These were small skills, all of them, but they represented a daily practice in self-reliance and problem-solving, a step-by-step overcoming of doubt and fear, until there was less overall to doubt, less to fear.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“This is the power of small, where the intermediate steps matter, where it can be relieving to engage in what’s immediately in front of you, and where a start can more readily lead to a finish.” (The Light We Carry Quotes)
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“We can’t know for sure what the future holds, but I do think it’s important to remember that we are also not helpless in the face of our worries.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“We only hurt ourselves when we hide our realness away.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“We practice our faith in the smallest of ways. And in practicing it, we remember what’s possible. With it, we are saying I can. We are saying I care. We are not giving up.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“We wanted it to feel like a palace of gladness, fueled by a sense of belonging and telegraphing one simple, powerful message: We will always like you here.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“We were friends now, and would stay that way. A couple of years ago, black-ish actress Tracee Ellis Ross wrote a touching tribute to her friend, the fashion editor Samira Nasr, on Facebook. She described how the two of them had met and bonded while working together at a magazine. Tracee had caught sight of Samira across a room and thought, “She has similar hair…I bet we could be friends.” And it turned out she was right. They’ve been besties for more than twenty-five years now. “I couldn’t do this life thing without her,” Tracee wrote in her post. “I am a barnacle on her life.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“We would catch sight of everything we were hoping not to see—his vulnerability, our helplessness, the uncertainty and harder times ahead.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“What do I most hope for them? I hope they find home, whatever that ends up looking like.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“What does it mean to be comfortably afraid? For me, the idea is simple. It’s about learning to deal wisely with fear, finding a way to let your nerves guide you rather than stop you. It’s settling yourself in the presence of life’s inevitable zombies and monsters so that you may contend with them more rationally, and trusting your own assessment of what’s harmful and what’s not. When you live this way, you are neither fully comfortable nor fully afraid. You accept that there’s a middle zone and learn to operate inside of it, awake and aware, but not held back.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“When everything starts to feel big and therefore scary and insurmountable, when I hit a point of feeling or thinking or seeing too much, I’ve learned to make the choice to go toward the small.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“When I looked out into those audiences, I saw something that confirmed what I knew to be true about my country and about the world more generally. I saw a colorful crowd, full of differences, and better for it. These were spaces where diversity was recognized and celebrated as a strength. I saw different ages, races, genders, ethnicities, identities, outfits, you name it—people laughing, clapping, crying, sharing. I sincerely believe that many of those people had turned up for reasons that stretched well past me or my book. My feeling was they’d shown up at least in part to feel less alone in the world, to locate some lost sense of belonging. Their presence—the energy, warmth, and diversity of those spaces—helped tell a certain story. People were there, I believe, because it felt good—it felt great, actually—to mix our differentness with togetherness.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“When it does work, it can feel like an actual, honest-to-god miracle, which is what love is, after all. That’s the whole point. Any long-term partnership, really, is an act of stubborn faith.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“When someone chooses to lift the curtain on a perceived imperfection in her story, on a circumstance or condition that traditionally might be considered to be a weakness, what she’s often actually revealing is the source code for her steadiness and strength.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“When we allow ourselves to celebrate tiny victories as important and meaningful, we start to understand the incremental nature of change—how one vote can help change our democracy; how raising a child who is whole and loved can help change a nation; how educating one girl can change a whole village for the better.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“When you start to rewrite the story of not-mattering, you start to find a new center. You remove yourself from other people’s mirrors and begin speaking more fully from your own experience, your own knowing place. You become better able to attach to your pride and more readily step over all the despites. It doesn’t remove the obstacles, but I’ve found that it helps to shrink them. It helps you to count your victories, even the small ones, and know that you’re doing okay.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“Which is why I think we must continue to practice the art of opening ourselves and connecting with others. The simple truth is that making a friend involves taking a risk, which of course means swallowing a little fear.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“Worry and discomfort of taking a risk, you’re potentially costing yourself an opportunity. In clinging only to what you know, you are making your world small. You are robbing yourself of chances to grow.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“Yes, that’s exactly right. When you want to make a difference, when you want to change the world, your mental health will sometimes get in the way.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“You can’t process the challenges of being different all on your own. It’s just too big, too painful, to keep inside. To try to carry it alone can be corrosive, draining.” (The Light We Carry Quotes)
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“You don’t have to like your teacher, and she doesn’t have to like you,” she said. “But she’s got math in her head that you need in yours, so maybe you should just go to school and get the math.” She looked at me then and smiled, as if this should be the simplest thing in the world to grasp. “You can come home to be liked,” she said. “We will always like you here.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
“Your table needs to be deliberately built, deliberately populated, and deliberately tended to.”
Michelle Obama
The Light We Carry
