Gail Sheehy Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

Ah, mastery... what a profoundly satisfying feeling when one finally gets on top of a new set of skills... and then sees the light under the new door those skills can open, even as another door is closing.

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

Growth demands a temporary surrender of security.

Since nobody upstages Rudolph Giuliani, his will be a Broadway-class show, perhaps his final bravura performance before November 2000, when he hopes to be turned out of the mayor's office by virtue of his election to the United States Senate.

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. She is less likely to have an agenda than a young woman-no biological clock tick-tocking beside her lover's bed, no campaign to lead him to the altar, no rescue fantasies. The seasoned woman knows who she is. She could be any one of us, as long a she is committed to living fully and passionately in the second half of her life, despite failures and false starts.

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.

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

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

It is a paradox that as we reach out prime, we also see there is a place where it finishes.

Men are not given awards and promotions for bravery in intimacy.

We must be willing to change chairs if we want to grow. There is no permanent compatibility between a chair and a person. And there is no one right chair. What is right at one stage may be restricting at another or too soft. During the passage from one stage to another, we will be between two chairs. Wobbling no doubt, but developing.

The perceptions of middle age have their own luminosity.

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

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.

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

children may need challenges and high-risk conditions in order to develop the self-generated immunity to trauma that characterizes survivors. To be tested is good. The challenged life may be the best therapist.

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.

The one thing prostitution is not is a 'victimless crime.' It attracts a wide species of preying criminals and generates a long line of victims, beginning with the most obvious and least understood - the prostitute herself.

You may never know when things start to go bad, but when things are worse you know it.

Adolescents are like cockroaches: They come out the minute you leave town, crawl the walls, feed indiscriminately, reproduce alarmingly unless drugged, and will certainly outlast you.

When you have self-respect, you have enough.

A restless vitality wells up as we approach 30.

It is Hillary's [Clinton] star power that radiates to every corner of the ballroom. New York bigwigs, such as financial-media impresario Michael Bloomberg, attorney and labor mediator Theodore Kheel, and District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, crane to see her.

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.

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

Democratization is not democracy; it is a slogan for the temporary liberalization handed down from an autocrat. Glasnost is not free speech; only free speech, constitutionally guaranteed, is free speech.

In the many times I have seen Hillary [Clinton] speak, she never fails to dazzle audiences by speaking in paragraphs, without notes.

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

Frustration is the mother of risk.

Transformation also means looking for ways to stop pushing yourself so hard professionally or inviting so much stress.

By listening, by caring, by playing you back to yourself, friends ratify your better instincts and endorse your unique worth. Friends validate you.

This is a woman [Hillary Clinton] who for many of her 52 years never cared a fig about her appearance, but in the chrysalis of transformation from political wife to independent woman, the jawline has been chiseled, the dominatrix eyebrows weeded, the weight dropped, and the result is a woman who obviously enjoys for the first time being called beautiful.

The [Hillary] Clinton campaign was still operating with a White House mentality.

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.

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.

Speed as a drug disorganizes the personality; speed as the goal of information dissemination commits a subtler crime. People are mainlining our words. We rarely read of the rational alternatives, only of the commands that all must change or else. This is a prescription for public panic.

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

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

According to the prevailing mythology, to be younger is to be better; therefore, we should expect to find young people in the majority of those who reflect high well-being... In fact, the one finding that registered more consistently and emphatically than any other in the course of my research was this: Older is better.

The fundamental steps of expansion that will open a person, over time, to the full flowering of his or her individuality are the same for both genders. But men and women are rarely in the same place struggling with the same questions at the same age.

In my memoir, I admit that I've been as fearful of success as of failure. In fact, when 'Passages' was published, I so dreaded bad reviews that I ran away to Italy with a girlfriend and our children to hide out.

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.

There is no more defiant denial of one man's ability to possess one woman exclusively than the prostitute who refuses to redeemed.

To hear how special and wonderful we are is endlessly enthralling.