Michelle Obama’s memoir, “Becoming,” has become an international best seller, translated into 31 languages. In North America, it sold over 2 million copies in the first 15 days after its release on November 13, 2018, making it the best selling hard cover book of the year. By the end of March, 2019, over 10 million copies had been sold, putting it at the pinnacle of any memoir – ever.
Women around the world are getting inspiration from Michelle on topics from being a working mother to finding your own passion and voice. This includes African women!
On this World Book Day, we’d like to share some of our favorite quotes from the book.
Girls Education
I knew they’d have to push back against the stereotypes that would get put on them, all the ways they’d be defined before they’d had a chance to define themselves. They’d need to fight the invisibility that comes with being poor, female, and of color. They’d have to work to find their voices and not be diminished, the keep themselves from getting beaten down. They would have to work just to learn.
An education was a thing worth working for, that it would help spring them forward in the world.
Travel / Africa
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.
Community Organizing
Our stories connected us to one another, and through those connections, it was possible to harness discontent and convert it to something useful.
“Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?” (Barack Obama) You may live in the world as it is, but you can still work to create the world as it should be.
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.
Successful People
They seem to operate as if they’ve had every advantage in the world. What I’ve learned is this: All of them 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.
Growing
Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own.
Now I think it’s one of the most useless questions and 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.
Becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as a forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self. The journey doesn’t end…. Becoming is never giving up on the idea that there’s more growing to be done.
Marriage
Even a happy marriage can be a vexation, that it’s a contract best renewed and renewed again, even quietly and privately – even alone.
I do recognize the value of individuals having their own interests, ambitions, and dreams, but I don’t believe that the pursuit of one person’s dreams should come at the expense of the couple.
Children
Kids wake up each day believing in the goodness of things, in the magic of what might be. They’re uncynical, believers at their core. We owe it to them to stay strong and keep working to create a more fair and humane world.
Friendships
Friendships between women, as any woman will tell you, are built of a thousand small kindnesses…, swapped back and forth and over again.
Grief
You look at something you’d otherwise find beautiful – a purple sky at sunset or a playground full of kids – and it only somehow deepens the loss. Grief is so lonely this way.
Barack
He reminded the audience that a country couldn’t be carved up simply into red and blue, that we were united by a common humanity, compelled to care for the whole of society. He called for hope over cynicism. He spoke with hope, projected hope, almost sang with it, really.
Being president doesn’t change who you are; it reveals who you are.
