Quotes from Gail Sheehy

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

Although there are many trial marriages... there is no such thing as a trial child.

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

As we reach midlife, we are not prepared for the idea that time can run out on us, or for the startling truth that if we don't hurry to pursue our own definition of a meaningful existence, life can become a repetition of trivial maintenance duties.

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

Here was a dyed-in-the-brine Cape Cod, Massachusetts, man who dropped into New York State on a carpetbag and used his slain brother's gilded connections to help win a Senate seat.

man who dropped into New York State on a carpetbag

early marriage usually foreclosed the possibility of a career dream.

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 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.

What is the first thing young people ask about in job interviews today: What are the health benefits? When I asked a savvy focus group of New Yorkers in their mid-twenties, "How safe do you feel—about sex, money, relationships, marriage, street violence, job security?" The response was urgent and unanimous. "None of the above. Unsafe on all levels. At all times." And

Ever since romanticism replaced the arranged marriage, the assumption has been that people marry for love. This is largely a myth. Any marriage can evolve into the mutual love of watching each other live. But first marriages are often a matter of conforming to the shoulds of the 20s.

There is nothing wrong with projecting this false self to the outside world during these early striving years, so long as it isn't too distant or disconnected from who we really are. Later, in the forties and fifties, it becomes imperative to find our way back to the truest things we know and to compose a more authentic self. Now

Because the 40s, as writer Barbara Fried so succinctly captures them, are a time when it seems no matter what course one has pursued, "everything is turning gray, drying up or leaving home.

I reread an observation by Willa Cather with a mixture of amusement and startled recognition: "THERE ARE ONLY two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.

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.

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.

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.

The career acceleration that for so many men precedes any inner survey also serves to delay it. By the time the true and sobering issues that are driving them forward begin to insist on acknowledgment, the impact may be more cruel. A crucible rather than a survey. Jung

The tasks of this period are as enormous as they are exhilarating: To shape a dream, that vision of one's own possibilities in the world that will generate energy, aliveness, and hope. To prepare for a lifework. To find a mentor if possible. And to form the capacity for intimacy without losing in the process whatever constancy of self we have thus far assembled. The first test structure must be erected around the life we choose to try. One

THE SHOULDS ARE defined by the family destiny, the press of the culture, and/or the prejudices of our peers.

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.

I want to have everything. And I don't see why I can't.

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. The