Gail Sheehy > Quotes

“Creativity could be described as letting go of certainties.”
― Gail Sheehy

“If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we aren't really living.”
― Gail Sheehy

“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”
― Gail Sheehy

“THE GREAT HEROISM OF A SOBER LIFE is getting up in the morning and facing the day, greeting others, going out into the world with something to give. When we are in the grave of our own thoughts, feeling like we will never be able to crawl back out, our fingernails packed with dirt, how is it that sometime later we can be laughing, and laughing hard?”
― Gail Sheehy, Daring: My Passages: A Memoir

“It is no longer enough to be competent and promising; a man wants now to be recognized and respected.”
― Gail Sheehy, Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life

“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.”
― Gail Sheehy, Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life

“No two people can possibly coordinate all their developmental crises.”
― Gail Sheehy, Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life

“And even as one part of us seeks the freedom to be an individual, another part is always searching for someone or something to surrender our freedom to.”
― Gail Sheehy, Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life

“Resolving the issues of one passage does not insulate us forever. There will be other tricky channels ahead, and we learn by moving through them. If we pretend the crises of development don’t exist, not only will they rise up later and hit with a greater wallop but in the meantime we don’t grow.”
― Gail Sheehy, Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life

“50, there is a new warmth and mellowing. Friends become more important than ever, but so does privacy. Since it is so often proclaimed by people past midlife, the motto of this stage might be “No more bullshit.”
― Gail Sheehy, Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life

“ONE OF THE terrifying aspects of the twenties is the conviction that the choices we make are irrevocable. If we choose a graduate school or join a firm, get married or don’t marry, move to the suburbs or forego travel abroad, decide against children or against a career, we fear in our marrow that we might have to live with that choice forever.”
― Gail Sheehy, Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life

“Many of us are not consciously aware of such fears. With enough surface bravado to fool the people we meet, we fool ourselves as well. But the memory of formlessness is never far beneath. So we hasten to try on life’s uniforms”
― Gail Sheehy, Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life

“Though loved ones move in and out of our lives, the capacity to love remains.”
― Gail Sheehy, Passages

“You can’t take everything with you when you leave on the midlife journey. You are moving away. Away from institutional claims and other people’s agenda. Away from external valuations and accreditations, in search of an inner validation. You are moving out of roles and into the self.”
― Gail Sheehy, Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life

“It is frightening to step off onto the treacherous footbridge leading to the second half of life. We can’t take everything with us on this journey through uncertainty. Along the way, we discover that we are alone. We no longer have to ask permission because we are the providers of our own safety. We must learn to give ourselves permission. We stumble upon feminine or masculine aspects of our natures that up to this time have usually been masked. There is grieving to be done because an old self is dying. By taking in our suppressed and even our unwanted parts, we prepare at the gut level for the reintegration of an identity that is ours and ours alone—not some artificial form put together to please the culture or our mates. It is a dark passage at the beginning. But by disassembling ourselves, we can glimpse the light and gather our parts into a renewal.”
― Gail Sheehy, Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life

“Further discomfort from these new realities afflicts men who expected to reach a certain level by dint of their white maleness but who now have to make room for women and minorities as well as their own generational bulge. The old boy network doesn’t help them much anymore.”
― Gail Sheehy, New Passages: Mapping Your Life Across Time

“WHATEVER YOU CAN DO, OR DREAM YOU CAN, BEGIN IT. BOLDNESS HAS GENIUS, POWER AND MAGIC IN IT. —GOETHE”
― Gail Sheehy, Daring: My Passages: A Memoir

“The other real forces urging young people into marriages generally sift down to one of the following: the need for safety, the need to fill some vacancy in themselves, the need to get away from home, the need for prestige or practicality. Safety”
― Gail Sheehy, Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life

“The forties are the time to rediscover community on a more realistic plane. Before this decade is out, if you are determined to become authentically yourself, you will find a way to assemble all the parts of your nature into one whole. You will have to stop pretending to be the person you have been and begin to recognize and ultimately accept who, or what, you are becoming.”
― Gail Sheehy, New Passages: Mapping Your Life Across Time

“We look to our mates, to our children, to money or success, hoping they will extend the protection of the caregivers from our childhood.”
― Gail Sheehy, Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life

“As men and women enter midlife, the tables begin to turn. Many men I interviewed found themselves wanting to learn how to be responsive.”
― Gail Sheehy, Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life

“We are the only ones with our own set of thoughts and bundle of feelings. Another person can taste them, through shared experience or conversation, but no other person can ever really digest them.”
― Gail Sheehy, Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life

“Single women in this country experience less discomfort and greater happiness and appear in most ways stronger in meeting the challenges of their positions than single men. Unmarried men suffer far more from neurotic and antisocial tendencies and are more often depressed and passive.”
― Gail Sheehy, Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life

“No matter how different the forms we choose, our concentration during the Trying Twenties is on mastering what we feel we are supposed to do.”
― Gail Sheehy, Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life

“In our 20s we tend to do what we think we should. In our 30s we do what we want to do, and in our 40s we question whatever we've done.”
― Gail Sheehy

“Doubts immobilize. Believing that we are independent and competent enough to master the external tasks constantly fortifies us in our attempts to become so. It is only later we discover that logic cannot penetrate the loneliness of the human soul. One”
― Gail Sheehy, Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life

“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. 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.”
― Gail Sheehy, Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life

“If there’s something about me you don’t like, just tell me,” says the newlywed anxious to please. “I’ll change it.” If he or she is not forthcoming with such an offer, the other one is determined to change it for the partner. “He may drink a little too much now,” the bride confides to her friend, “but I’ll reform him.” Examination”
― Gail Sheehy, Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life

“Ignorant of our own and our mate’s inner life, we are ruled largely by external forces at this stage.”
― Gail Sheehy, Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life

“Many people find it easier to live together when that commitment is voluntarily renewed. The”
― Gail Sheehy, Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life