Gail Sheehy Quotes (26 Quotes)

Growth demands a temporary surrender of security.

The perceptions of middle age have their own luminosity.

It is a silly question to ask a prostitute why she does it.. These are the highest-paid professional women in America.

Creativity can be described as letting go of certainties.

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

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

No sooner do we think we have assembled a comfortable life than we find a piece of ourselves that has no place to fit in.

He was right. In those first days after the President's admission to the nation, even his staunchest supporters had been scarcely able to contain their rage. I wish, ... I had the guts to tell him what I really think.

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!

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

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.

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

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

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

Because men have to, and women can chose to. Women remind men and guilt them into it.

We hear the haunting presentiment of a dutiful middle age in the current reluctance of young people to select any option except the one they feel will impinge upon them the least.

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 keeping up.

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

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.

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

Phases of the creative process Preparation-gathering impressions Incubation-letting go of certainties Immersion; Illumination-creative interventionrisk Revision-conscious structuring and editing of creative material.

There certainly are middle-aged children who have an oh-my-God, Mom's-gone-wild reaction if Mom starts to date. But what they should recognize is that if Mom has a boyfriend, she won't be nagging them about how they have to come to her for Christmas.

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.

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

The delights of self-discovery are always available.

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