Gail Sheehy Quotes

If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we are not really living.

Growth demands a temporary surrender of security.

Would that there were an award for people who come to understand the concept of enough. Good enough. Successful enough. Thin enough. Rich enough. Socially responsible enough. When you have self-respect, you have enough.

Growth demands a temporary surrender of security. It may mean a giving up of familiar but limiting patterns, safe but unrewarding work, values no longer believed in, relationships that have lost their meaning. As Dostoevsky put it, "Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most." The real fear should be of the opposite course.

My mother had demonstrated that the best way to defeat the numbing ambivalence of middle age is to surprise yourself - by pulling off some cartwheel of thought or action never even imagined at a younger age.

A seasoned woman is spicy. She has been marinated in life experiences. Like a complex wine, she can be alternately sweet, tart, sparkling, mellow. She is both maternal and playful. Assured, alluring, and resourceful.

If every day is an awakening, you will never grow old. You will just keep growing.

As we reach midlife in the middle thirties or early forties, we are not prepared for the idea that time can run out on us, or for the startling truth that if we don't hurry to pursue our own definition of a meaningful existence, life can become a repetition of trivial maintenance duties.

If menopause is the silent passage, 'male menopause' is the unspeakable passage. It is fraught with secrecy, shame, and denial. It is much more fundamental than the ending of the fertile period of a woman's life, because it strikes at the core of what it is to be a man.

Being a pathfinder is to be willing to risk failure and still go on.

If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we aren't really living.

Although there are many trial marriages... there is no such thing as a trial child.

The work of adult life is not easy. As in childhood, each step presents not only new tasks of development but requires a letting go of the techniques that worked before. With each passage some magic must be given up, some cherished illusion of safety and comfortably familiar sense of self must be cast off, to allow for the greater expansion of our distinctiveness.

Husbands come and go; children come and eventually they go. Friends grow up and move away. But the one thing that's never lost is your sister.

With each passage of human growth we must shed a protective structure . We are left exposed and vulnerable - but also yeasty and embryonic again, capable of stretching in ways we hadn't known before.

When men reach their sixties and retire, they go to pieces. Women go right on cooking.

The source of continuing aliveness was to find your passion and pursue it, with whole heart and single mind.

The secret of a leader lies in the tests he has faced over the whole course of his life and the habit of action he develops in meeting those tests.

My research offers impressive evidence that we feel better when we attempt to make our world better...to have a purpose beyond one's self lends to existence a meaning and direction - the most important characteristic of high well-being.

Whether one has natural talent or not, any learning period requires the willingness to suffer uncertainty and embarrassment.

The present never ages. Each moment is like a snowflake, unique, unspoiled, unrepeatable, and can be appreciated in its surprisingness.

Phases of the creative process: Preparation-gathering impressions Incubation-letting go of certainties Immersion/Illumination-creative intervention/risk Revision-conscious structuring and editing of creative material.

Changes are not only possible and predictable, but to deny them is to be an accomplice to one's own unnecessary vegetation.

To be tested is good. The challenged life may be the best therapist.

The secret in the search for meaning is to find your passion and pursue it.