Becoming Quotes
"As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end."
"There’s a lot I still don’t know about America, about life, about what the future might bring. But I do know myself."
"Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own."
"I’ve been held up as the most powerful woman in the world and taken down as an 'angry black woman.'"
"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."
"Time, as far as my father was concerned, was a gift you gave to other people."
"My family was never going to be house poor, because we weren’t going to own a house."
"Everyone on earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance."
"I didn’t stop to ask myself then what would happen to all the kids who’d been left in the basement with the teacher who couldn’t teach."
"The idea was we were to transcend, to get ourselves further. They’d planned for it. They encouraged it. We were expected not just to be smart but to own our smartness—to inhabit it with pride."
"I realize I don’t know exactly what my mom did during the hours we were at school, mainly because in the self-centered manner of any child I never asked."
"It’s because of my mother that still to this day I catch the scent of Pine-Sol and automatically feel better about life."
"Advice, when she offered it, tended to be of the hard-boiled and pragmatic variety."
"She loved us consistently, Craig and me, but we were not overmanaged."
"It was another small push out into the world."
"It was our life, not hers, and always would be."
"I knew that when my class was going on an excursion, my mother would almost always volunteer to chaperone."
"My mother maintained the sort of parental mind-set that I now recognize as brilliant and nearly impossible to emulate—a kind of unflappable Zen neutrality."
"When things were bad, she gave us only a small amount of pity."
"I’m not raising babies," she’d tell us. "I’m raising adults."
"Instead, she monitored our moods and bore benevolent witness to whatever travails or triumphs a day might bring."
"It’s hard to put into words what sometimes you pick up in the ether, the quiet, cruel nuances of not belonging—the subtle cues that tell you to not risk anything, to find your people and just stay put."
"But I was trying, if only half consciously, to represent the alternative. I belonged at Princeton, as much as anybody."
"I wasn’t going to let one person’s opinion dislodge everything I thought I knew about myself."
"I was applauded just for getting in, even if the truth was I’d somehow squeaked in off the wait list."
"It can put you on the established path—the my-isn’t-that-impressive path—and keep you there for a long time."
"Maybe you spend three years in Massachusetts, studying constitutional law and discussing the relative merits of exclusionary vertical agreements in antitrust cases."
"Your passion stays low, yet under no circumstance will you underperform."
"What happens next is that the rewards get real."
"Is there anything to question? It doesn’t seem that way."
"You have yet to understand the altering force of a simple yes."
"I read memos, I wrote memos, I edited other people’s memos."
"I could look out over the hodgepodge of the business district and see the white-capped waves of Lake Michigan."
"I made good money at Sidley but was pragmatic enough to take a bird in the hand when it came to housing."
"I’d been hired into the firm’s marketing and intellectual property practice group, which was considered internally more freewheeling and creative than other groups."
"The problem for me was that as a junior associate my work didn’t involve much actual interaction with clients."
"If I had to spend seventy hours a week somewhere, my office was a pleasant enough place."
"I had a leather chair, a buffed walnut desk, and wide windows with a southeastern view."
"You reach for the next rung of the ladder, and this time it’s a job with a salary in the Chicago offices of a high-end law firm called Sidley & Austin."
"You’re back where you started, in the city where you were born."
"You used to pass by it as a South Side kid riding the bus to high school, peering mutely out the window at the people who strode like titans to their jobs."
"He saw marriage as the loving alignment of two people who could lead parallel lives but without forgoing any independent dreams or ambitions."
"I wanted to live with the hat-tossing, independent-career-woman zest of Mary Tyler Moore, and at the same time I gravitated toward the stabilizing, self-sacrificing, seemingly bland normalcy of being a wife and mother."
"I was learning to adapt, to knit ourselves into a solid and forever form of us."
"Barack, I’ve come to understand, is the sort of person who needs a hole, a closed-off little warren where he can read and write undisturbed."
"We were learning to adapt, to knit ourselves into a solid and forever form of us."
"For him, the Hole is a kind of sacred high place, where insights are birthed and clarity comes to visit."
"He was getting battered already, but it wasn’t bothering him. It did seem he was built for this. He’d get dinged up and stay shiny, like an old copper pot."
"I was thirty-two years old now and starting to think more about what kind of load I wanted to carry."
"Fertility is not something you conquer. Rather maddeningly, there’s no straight line between effort and reward."
"A miscarriage is lonely, painful, and demoralizing almost on a cellular level."
"What nobody tells you is that miscarriage happens all the time, to more women than you’d ever guess."
"I wanted a baby. It was a need that had been there forever."
"This was my privilege, the gift of being female. I felt bright with the promise of what I carried."
"A part-time job, especially when it’s meant to be a scaled-down version of your previously full-time job, can be something of a trap."
"I wasn’t accustomed to any of this. I wasn’t used to having opponents or seeing my family life scrutinized in the news."
"It was astonishing to see how our leaders treated him only as a threat to their power."
"Our family’s life would unfold—whether everything would go well or everything would go poorly, or whether, like most people, we’d get a solid mix of both."
"But then came a call from Susan Sher, my former mentor and colleague at city hall who was now general counsel and a vice president at the University of Chicago Medical Center."
"I said yes because I believed that Barack could be a great president."
"He spoke so often and so passionately of healing our country’s divisions, appealing to a set of higher ideals he believed were innate in most people."
"I supported him in campaigning, but I also felt certain he wouldn’t make it all the way."
"We were living with other people’s expectations so long that they were almost embedded in every conversation we had."
"My husband was a senator, but somehow people seemed to want to vault right over that."
"I said yes, though I was at the same time harboring a painful thought, one I wasn’t ready to share."
"The whole operation would be overseen by the two deeply invested Davids—Axelrod and Plouffe."
"I’d made it clear already that we would not stay onstage for his twenty-minute address. It was too much to ask two little kids to sit still and pretend to be interested."
"For the first time in my adult lifetime, I'm really proud of my country."
"What we've learned over this year is that hope is making a comeback."
"I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction, and just not feeling so alone in my frustration and disappointment."
"I feel privileged to be a part of even witnessing this."
"Bullies were scared people hiding inside scary people."
"The easiest way to disregard a woman's voice is to package her as a scold."
"It’s remarkable how a stereotype functions as an actual trap."
"School was routine. School was comfort."
"Voting was both simple and incredibly effective."
"After months of everything going too fast, time slows to an agonizing crawl."
"Throughout the campaign, I’d asked myself over and over whether America was really ready to elect a black president."
"I worried that many Americans wouldn’t see themselves reflected in me."
"Confidence, I’d learned then, sometimes needs to be called from within."
"I intended to arrive at the White House with a carefully thought-out strategy."
"Forget that she sometimes wore a diamond crown and that I’d flown to London on the presidential jet; we were just two tired ladies oppressed by our shoes."
"The energy I felt thrumming in that school had nothing to do with obstacles. It was the power of nine hundred girls striving."
"I love talking to my husband across a small table in a low-lit room."
"Having a drink and an unrushed meal together has always been our pathway back to the start."
"Barack is a good listener, patient and thoughtful."
"I love how he tips his head back when he laughs."
"I felt a fluttering excitement at the prospect of a getaway."
"New York always awakened a sense of awe in me."
"Our movements had been planned meticulously in advance by our scheduling teams and the Secret Service."
"We ordered martinis. Our conversation stayed light."
"The ground around him never seemed to stop shaking."
"That evening in New York, we ate, drank, and conversed in the candlelight."
"The White House is a remarkably beautiful and comfortable place."
"I struggled sometimes, trying to balance my needs with what was convenient for others."
"If anyone in our family wanted to step outside onto the Truman Balcony, we needed to first alert the Secret Service."
"The garden was popular and the garden was wholesome."
"I understood that I was being watched with a certain kind of anticipation."
"I intended to do everything—to work with purpose and parent with care."
"I felt sometimes like a swan on a lake, knowing that my job was in part to glide and appear serene."