Gail Sheehy Quotes
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Creativity can be described as letting go of certainties.
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If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we aren't really living.
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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.
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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.
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I dare to do things - that's how I survive.
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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.
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I actually like getting out of my comfort zone. It shakes me up.
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Changes are not only possible and predictable, but to deny them is to be an accomplice to one's own unnecessary vegetation.
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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?'
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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.
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I do think women can have it all - but not all women. If you take daring steps and are smart about it, you can probably have it all. But you might have to wait a while.
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Be willing to shed parts of your previous life. For example, in our 20s, we wear a mask; we pretend we know more than we do. We must be willing, as we get older, to shed cocktail party phoniness and admit, 'I am who I am.'
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I do think taking the 20s to take the most chances you can is important, because you're not going to hurt anyone else during that time. And if you do have a partner, you need a couple years to rehearse that relationship.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Back in 1968, when I was 30, my entire life blew up. I had a life plan, and it collapsed for no rational reason.
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I've had the experience of having a book praised but then it doesn't sell. Or not praised but then it sells.
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Family caregiving has become a predictable crisis. Americans are living longer and longer but dying slower and slower.
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Married at 23, a mother at 24, and blindsided by divorce at 28, I found myself struggling, like many young women I meet today, to strike a balance between my personal life and my career.
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Spontaneity, the hallmark of childhood, is well worth cultivating to counteract the rigidity that may otherwise set in as we grow older.
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When I was immobilized by fear, I might have a panic attack. I've had a couple of panic attacks in my life.
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The perceptions of middle age have their own luminosity.
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People in grief need someone to walk with them without judging them.