Gail Sheehy Quotes
- Though loved ones move in and out of our lives, the capacity to love remains.
2. 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.
3. No two people can possibly coordinate all their developmental crises.
4. To be tested is good. the challenged life may be the best therapist.
5. And somewhere between the late thirties and early forties when we enter midlife, we also have the opportunity for true adulthood, whereupon we proceed either to wither inside our husks or to regather and re-pot ourselves for the flowering into our full authenticity.
6. We look to our mates, to our children, to money or success, hoping they will extend the protection of the caregivers from our childhood.
7. Today the smart man will use his early forties as preparation time. What does he need to learn to maximize his ability to respond quickly to a fluid marketplace?
8. 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.
9. The forties are the time to rediscover the 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.
10. If we don’t change, we don’t grow. If we don’t grow, we aren’t really living.
11. The illusions of the twenties, however, may be essential to infuse our first commitments with excitement and intensity, and to sustain us in those commitments long enough to gain us some experience in living.
12. 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.
13. I want to have everything. And I don’t see why I can’t.
14. We are utterly convinced that all our notions spring full blown, as if by magic, from our own unique selves.
15. 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.
16. As men and women enter midlife, the tables begin to turn. Many men I interviewed found themselves wanting to learn how to be responsive.
17. Creativity could be described as letting go of certainties.
18. One of the terrifying aspects of the 20s is the inner conviction that the choices we make are irrevocable. It is largely a false fear. Change is quite possible, and some alteration of our original choices is probably inevitable.
19. Life after adolescence is not one long plateau. Changes are not only possible and predictable but to deny them is to be an accomplice to one’s own unnecessary vegetation.
20. 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, and the need for prestige or practicality.
21. Many people find it easier to live together when that commitment is voluntarily renewed.
22. The great heroism of sofer life is getting up in the morning and facing the day, greeting others, going out into the world with something to give.
23. “Perfect” is that person we imbue with the capacity to enliven and support our vision or the person we believe in and want to help.
24. Ignorant of our own and our mate’s inner life, we are ruled largely by external forces at this stage.
25. It is no longer enough to be competent and promising; a man wants now to be recognized and respected.
26. What is disassembling is that narrow self we have thus far put together in a form tailored to please the culture and other people.
27. Trying to stabilize—that is what the twenties are all about.
28. The shoulds are defined by the family destiny, the press of the culture, and/or the prejudices of our peers.
29. 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.
30. 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
31. The caring of experienced partners goes less into roles and more into enhancing the special qualities and endearing idiosyncrasies that brought them together in the first place.
