Gail Sheehy Quotes

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

Adapting to our Second Adulthood is not all about the money. It requires thinking about how to find a new locus of identity or how to adjust to a spouse who stops working and who may loll, enjoying coffee and reading the paper online while you're still commuting.

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.

I did not give my daughter the kind of childhood anybody would want. The vision of the divided loyalty between a mother and father who don't live together and don't share in decisions is a great depravation for children.

The dream for many millennial women is to make a difference as social or political entrepreneurs. They are using the social media and marketing tools they have mastered to empower less fortunate women and direct them onto career tracks that women have traditionally avoided, like science and technology.

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.

The perceptions of middle age have their own luminosity.

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.

When I was immobilized by fear, I might have a panic attack. I've had a couple of panic attacks in my life.

By operating on the principle of human and material obsolescence, America eats her history alive.

No one can control the aging process or the trajectory of illness.

The feminist spirit still lives! It shows most boldly among younger women from the millennial generation.

We really only have two choices. Play it safe, or take a chance. For me, pulling back because of fear has always made me feel worse.

It was my very good fortune to find a mentor, Clay Felker, who started my career at the 'New York Magazine' as a freelance writer when I had to quit my job at the 'Herald Tribune' to stay home with my young daughter.

I found that female pathfinders generally integrate characteristics commonly associated with being women - like the capacity to be intimate - with 'male' ones like ambition and courage.

With the only certainty in our daily existence being change, and a rate of change growing always faster in a kind of technological leapfrog game, speed helps people think they are catching up.

Creativity can be described as letting go of certainties.

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.

We have to move from the unbridled pursuit of self-gain at the expense of others to recovering appreciation for what we gain by caring and sharing with one another.

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.

I was devastated when I got the review for my first book. The book came out a couple years before the women's movement broke through, and people were putting it down, asking, 'Why does the woman in this book need to get a divorce? Why can't she just shut up and be happy?'

I know I'm never going to probably see the Taj Mahal or, you know, climb Mt. Everest, but I can still maybe influence peoples' way of thinking by a story that I do, by something I learn about the world.

The delights of self-discovery are always available.

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.

We see it in the body, that if you just give the body enough rest and comfort, it has remarkable self-healing capacities. Well, so does the spirit.

Very few women manage to have it all; certainly not all at once.

It seems like, to me, somewhere between 30 and 35 is a really, really good time to turn your eggs into babies.

Jill Clayburgh's life so closely paralleled mine, I feel as though a part of me lived a little through her and died a little with her.

In 2009, I served as AARP's Ambassador of Caregiving. With a producer and cameraman, I traveled the country for months, interviewing hundreds of caregivers.

I keep returning to the central question facing over-50 women as we move into our Second Adulthood. What are our goals for this stage in our lives?

The first thing one notices about Jill Abramson is her short stature. The second is her intensity.

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

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.

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

Career-driven millennials are strategic about working obsessively while they are single and earning enough money to afford advanced education. Most are patient enough to wait until 30 or later to develop their dream.

Over the next few years the boardrooms of America are going to light up with hot flashes.

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

I'm a liberal, but I think there's so much that the private sector can do and does do.

I actually like getting out of my comfort zone. It shakes me up.

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

This is something caregivers have to understand: You have to ask for help. You have to realize that you deserve to ask for help. Because you need to keep on working on your own life.

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.

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.

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.

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

Back in 1968, when I was 30, my entire life blew up. I had a life plan, and it collapsed for no rational reason.

Character is what was yesterday and will be tomorrow.

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.

In rough times, pathfinders rely on work, friends, humor and prayer. They develop a support network.

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.

I've had the experience of having a book praised but then it doesn't sell. Or not praised but then it sells.

You don't have to feel confident to act confident. In fact, it's the most important acting job you can learn.

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

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

Family caregiving has become a predictable crisis. Americans are living longer and longer but dying slower and slower.

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.

Stress overload makes us stupid. Solid research proves it. When we get overstressed, it creates a nasty chemical soup in our brains that makes it hard to pull out of the anxious depressive spiral.

If you begin to think you are solely responsible for keeping your loved one alive and safe, you will eventually find yourself playing God. This phase can develop into an unhealthy, codependent relationship.

Most women have learned a great deal about how to set goals for our First Adulthood and how to roll with the punches when we hit a rough passage. But we're less prepared for our Second Adulthood as we approach life after retirement, where there are no fixed entrances or exits, and lots of sand into which it is easy to bury our heads.

You have a new role: family caregiver. It's a role nobody applies for. You don't expect it. You won't be prepared. You probably won't even identify yourself as a caregiver.

It was so naive to think that there was nothing interesting that happened after 55. Come on, there's a whole second adulthood!

Spontaneity, the hallmark of childhood, is well worth cultivating to counteract the rigidity that may otherwise set in as we grow older.

One of the ways we women often handicap ourselves is thinking that once we've made a decision or a commitment, we can't change.

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.

If you're the person living closest to the parent who's going to need help, and you take on the whole role of primary caregiver, you can be pretty sure your sibling who lives farthest away is going to call you and say, 'You don't know what you're doing.' Because they're not on the spot, and they probably feel guilty.

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

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

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.

Frustration is the mother of risk.

Leaders are people we as followers want to regard with awe as the fullest flowering of our own possibilities.