Gail Sheehy Quotes

31 Sourced Quotes

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
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