Gail Sheehy Quotes

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another!"

"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."

"Sex and older women used to be considered an oxymoron, rarely mentioned in the same breath."

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

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

"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 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."

"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."

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

"I found the happiest woman in America is between 50 and 55, is happily married, has made significant progress in her career, and lives in a community where she can easily exercise outside. But the most important single thing was she had her last child before she was 35."

"The perceptions of middle age have their own luminosity."

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

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

"Eventually, all mentor-disciple relationships are meant to pull apart, usually sometime in the mid-30s. Those who hang on, eventually the mentor drops the disciple, and that's no fun."

"People in grief need someone to walk with them without judging them."

"Character is what was yesterday and will be tomorrow."

"Like everyone else in the first weeks after the tragedy of 9/11, I was looking frantically for some way to help."

"In the first phase of shock over, say, your mortgage being called in or your job washed out, it's essential to engage with others and share the fear, release the feelings, do fun things to take your mind off it."

"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."

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

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

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