Gail Sheehy quotes
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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. 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 -
Growth demands a temporary surrender of security.
-- Gail Sheehy -
Although there are many trial marriages... there is no such thing as a trial child.
-- Gail Sheehy -
To be tested is good. The challenged life may be the best therapist.
-- Gail Sheehy -
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If every day is an awakening, you will never grow old. You will just keep growing.
-- Gail Sheehy -
Transformation also means looking for ways to stop pushing yourself so hard professionally or inviting so much stress.
-- Gail Sheehy -
Whether one has natural talent or not, any learning period requires the willingness to suffer uncertainty and embarrassment.
-- Gail Sheehy -
A seasoned woman is spicy. She has been marinated in life experiences. Like a complex wine, she can be alternately sweet, tart, sparkling, mellow. She is both maternal and playful. Assured, alluring, and resourceful.
-- Gail Sheehy -
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Phases of the creative process: Preparation-gathering impressions Incubation-letting go of certainties Immersion/Illumination-creative intervention/risk Revision-conscious structuring and editing of creative material.
-- Gail Sheehy -
The work of adult life is not easy. As in childhood, each step presents not only new tasks of development but requires a letting go of the techniques that worked before. With each passage some magic must be given up, some cherished illusion of safety and comfortably familiar sense of self must be cast off, to allow for the greater expansion of our distinctiveness.
-- Gail Sheehy -
You may never know when things start to go bad, but when things are worse you know it.
-- Gail Sheehy -
We must be willing to change chairs if we want to grow. There is no permanent compatibility between a chair and a person. And there is no one right chair. What is right at one stage may be restricting at another or too soft. During the passage from one stage to another, we will be between two chairs. Wobbling no doubt, but developing.
-- Gail Sheehy -
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Frustration is the mother of risk.
-- Gail Sheehy -
To hear how special and wonderful we are is endlessly enthralling.
-- Gail Sheehy -
The source of continuing aliveness was to find your passion and pursue it, with whole heart and single mind.
-- Gail Sheehy -
According to the prevailing mythology, to be younger is to be better; therefore, we should expect to find young people in the majority of those who reflect high well-being... In fact, the one finding that registered more consistently and emphatically than any other in the course of my research was this: Older is better.
-- Gail Sheehy -
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When you have self-respect, you have enough.
-- Gail Sheehy -
The fundamental steps of expansion that will open a person, over time, to the full flowering of his or her individuality are the same for both genders. But men and women are rarely in the same place struggling with the same questions at the same age.
-- Gail Sheehy -
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.
-- Gail Sheehy -
Changes are not only possible and predictable, but to deny them is to be an accomplice to one's own unnecessary vegetation.
-- Gail Sheehy -
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Sex and older women used to be considered an oxymoron, rarely mentioned in the same breath.
-- Gail Sheehy -
It is a paradox that as we reach out prime, we also see there is a place where it finishes.
-- Gail Sheehy -
When men reach their sixties and retire, they go to pieces. Women go right on cooking.
-- Gail Sheehy -
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.
-- Gail Sheehy -
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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 perceptions of middle age have their own luminosity.
-- Gail Sheehy -
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.
-- Gail Sheehy -
There is no more defiant denial of one man's ability to possess one woman exclusively than the prostitute who refuses to redeemed.
-- Gail Sheehy -
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If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we aren't really living.
-- Gail Sheehy -
Husbands come and go; children come and eventually they go. Friends grow up and move away. But the one thing that's never lost is your sister.
-- Gail Sheehy -
The delights of self-discovery are always available.
-- Gail Sheehy -
By listening, by caring, by playing you back to yourself, friends ratify your better instincts and endorse your unique worth. Friends validate you.
-- Gail Sheehy -
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My research offers impressive evidence that we feel better when we attempt to make our world better...to have a purpose beyond one's self lends to existence a meaning and direction - the most important characteristic of high well-being.
-- Gail Sheehy -
The secret in the search for meaning is to find your passion and pursue it.
-- Gail Sheehy -
My mother had demonstrated that the best way to defeat the numbing ambivalence of middle age is to surprise yourself - by pulling off some cartwheel of thought or action never even imagined at a younger age.
-- Gail Sheehy -
As we reach midlife in the middle thirties or early forties, 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.
-- Gail Sheehy -
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It is a silly question to ask a prostitute why she does it ... These are the highest-paid 'professional' women in America.
-- Gail Sheehy -
The one thing prostitution is not is a 'victimless crime.' It attracts a wide species of preying criminals and generates a long line of victims, beginning with the most obvious and least understood - the prostitute herself.
-- Gail Sheehy -
Leaders are people we as followers want to regard with awe as the fullest flowering of our own possibilities.
-- Gail Sheehy -
Speed as a drug disorganizes the personality; speed as the goal of information dissemination commits a subtler crime. People are mainlining our words. We rarely read of the rational alternatives, only of the commands that all must change or else. This is a prescription for public panic.
-- Gail Sheehy -
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The present never ages. Each moment is like a snowflake, unique, unspoiled, unrepeatable, and can be appreciated in its surprisingness.
-- Gail Sheehy -
If menopause is the silent passage, 'male menopause' is the unspeakable passage. It is fraught with secrecy, shame, and denial. It is much more fundamental than the ending of the fertile period of a woman's life, because it strikes at the core of what it is to be a man.
-- Gail Sheehy -
A seasoned woman is spicy. She has been marinated in life experiences. Like a complex wine, she can be alternately sweet, tart, sparkling, mellow. She is both maternal and playful. Assured, alluring, and resourceful. She is less likely to have an agenda than a young woman-no biological clock tick-tocking beside her lover's bed, no campaign to lead him to the altar, no rescue fantasies. The seasoned woman knows who she is. She could be any one of us, as long a she is committed to living fully and passionately in the second half of her life, despite failures and false starts.
-- Gail Sheehy -
With the only certainty in our daily existence being change, and a rate of change growing always faster in a kind of technological leapfrog game, speed helps people think they are catching up.
-- Gail Sheehy -
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With each passage of human growth we must shed a protective structure . We are left exposed and vulnerable - but also yeasty and embryonic again, capable of stretching in ways we hadn't known before.
-- Gail Sheehy -
Democratization is not democracy; it is a slogan for the temporary liberalization handed down from an autocrat. Glasnost is not free speech; only free speech, constitutionally guaranteed, is free speech.
-- Gail Sheehy -
Adolescents are like cockroaches: They come out the minute you leave town, crawl the walls, feed indiscriminately, reproduce alarmingly unless drugged, and will certainly outlast you.
-- Gail Sheehy -
by operating on the principle of human and material obsolescence, America eats her history alive.
-- Gail Sheehy -
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children may need challenges and high-risk conditions in order to develop the self-generated immunity to trauma that characterizes survivors. To be tested is good. The challenged life may be the best therapist.
-- Gail Sheehy
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