155 Quotes by Gail Sheehy

Creativity could be described as letting go of certainties.

As men and women enter midlife, the tables begin to turn. Many men I interviewed found themselves wanting to learn how to be responsive.

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.

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.

The forties are the time to rediscover 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.

Many of us are not consciously aware of such fears. With enough surface bravado to fool the people we meet, we fool ourselves as well. But the memory of formlessness is never far beneath. So we hasten to try on life’s uniforms.

ONE OF THE terrifying aspects of the twenties is the conviction that the choices we make are irrevocable. If we choose a graduate school or join a firm, get married or don’t marry, move to the suburbs or forego travel abroad, decide against children or against a career, we fear in our marrow that we might have to live with that choice forever.

Though loved ones move in and out of our lives, the capacity to love remains.

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.