Gail Sheehy
When men reach their sixties and retire, they go to pieces. Women go right on cooking.Collection: Women
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.Collection: Chance
The delights of self-discovery are always available.Collection: Learning
If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we aren't really living.Collection: Change
Career-driven millennials are strategic about working obsessively while they are single and earning enough money to afford advanced education. Most are patient enough to wait until 30 or later to develop their dream.Collection: Education
Growth demands a temporary surrender of security.
To be tested is good. The challenged life may be the best therapist.
Spontaneity, the hallmark of childhood, is well worth cultivating to counteract the rigidity that may otherwise set in as we grow older.
Creativity can be described as letting go of certainties.
If every day is an awakening, you will never grow old. You will just keep growing.
I actually like getting out of my comfort zone. It shakes me up.
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!
I've had the experience of having a book praised but then it doesn't sell. Or not praised but then it sells.
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.
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.
People in grief need someone to walk with them without judging them.
It is a paradox that as we reach out prime, we also see there is a place where it finishes.
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.
I actually interviewed other people about myself, and that alerted me to the fact that I had to really investigate my memories.
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.
Stress overload makes us stupid. Solid research proves it. When we get overstressed, it creates a nasty chemical soup in our brains that makes it hard to pull out of the anxious depressive spiral.
Changes are not only possible and predictable, but to deny them is to be an accomplice to one's own unnecessary vegetation.
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.
The perceptions of middle age have their own luminosity.
There is no more defiant denial of one man's ability to possess one woman exclusively than the prostitute who refuses to redeemed.
Sex and older women used to be considered an oxymoron, rarely mentioned in the same breath.
Over the next few years the boardrooms of America are going to light up with hot flashes.
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.
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.
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.
It seems like, to me, somewhere between 30 and 35 is a really, really good time to turn your eggs into babies.
Character is what was yesterday and will be tomorrow.
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.
It was so naive to think that there was nothing interesting that happened after 55. Come on, there's a whole second adulthood!
When I was immobilized by fear, I might have a panic attack. I've had a couple of panic attacks in my life.
I'd visually have that idea. I'm diving off the end of the diving board. I'm not going to be worried about if I'm going to dive into a jellyfish or the water's going to be too cold or the boys are going to beat me. I'm just doing it. And if I do it, it's a good chance I'll make it.
I know I'm never going to probably see the Taj Mahal or, you know, climb Mt. Everest, but I can still maybe influence peoples' way of thinking by a story that I do, by something I learn about the world.
I'm a liberal, but I think there's so much that the private sector can do and does do.
Like everyone else in the first weeks after the tragedy of 9/11, I was looking frantically for some way to help.
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.
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?'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No one can control the aging process or the trajectory of illness.
In the case of my husband, we found that facing a life-threatening illness prodded us to make a dramatic change in our lives.
The first thing one notices about Jill Abramson is her short stature. The second is her intensity.
Most women have learned a great deal about how to set goals for our First Adulthood and how to roll with the punches when we hit a rough passage. But we're less prepared for our Second Adulthood as we approach life after retirement, where there are no fixed entrances or exits, and lots of sand into which it is easy to bury our heads.