Gail Sheehy Quotes

31 Sourced Quotes

If every day is an awakening, you will never grow old. You will just keep growing.

Gail Sheehy
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
Creativity can be described as letting go of certainties.

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
By operating on the principle of human and material obsolescence, America eats her history alive.

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
There is no more defiant denial of one man's ability to possess one woman exclusively than the prostitute who refuses to be redeemed.

Gail Sheehy
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
The secret in the search for meaning is to find your passion and pursue it.

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
Sex and older women used to be considered an oxymoron, rarely mentioned in the same breath.

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
The source of continuing aliveness was to find your passion and pursue it, with whole heart and single mind.

Gail Sheehy
You may never know when things start to go bad, but when things are worse you know it.

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
The present never ages. Each moment is like a snowflake, unique, unspoiled, unrepeatable, and can be appreciated in its surprisingness.

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
Leaders are people we as followers want to regard with awe as the fullest flowering of our own possibilities.

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
It is a silly question to ask a prostitute why she does it... These are the highest-paid 'professional' women in America.

Gail Sheehy
Into this anonymous pit they climb — a fumbling, frightened, pathetic man and a cold, contemptuous, violated woman — prepared to exchange for twenty dollars no more than ten minutes of animal sex, untouched by a stroke of their common humanity.

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
Men are not given awards and promotions for bravery in intimacy.

Gail Sheehy
To hear how special and wonderful we are is endlessly enthralling.

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
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
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
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 to think they are keeping up.

Gail Sheehy
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.

Gail Sheehy
We are not unlike a particularly hardy crustacean. The lobster grows by developing and shedding a series of hard, protective shells. Each time it expands from within, the confining skin must be sloughed off. It is left exposed and vulnerable until, in time, a new covering grows to replace the old.

Gail Sheehy