Gail Sheehy quotes:

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.

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.

Adapting to our Second Adulthood is not all about the money. It requires thinking about how to find a new locus of identity or how to adjust to a spouse who stops working and who may loll, enjoying coffee and reading the paper online while you're still commuting.

The dream for many millennial women is to make a difference as social or political entrepreneurs. They are using the social media and marketing tools they have mastered to empower less fortunate women and direct them onto career tracks that women have traditionally avoided, like science and technology.

To be tested is good. The challenged life may be the best therapist.

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

This is something caregivers have to understand: You have to ask for help. You have to realize that you deserve to ask for help. Because you need to keep on working on your own life.

I know I'm never going to probably see the Taj Mahal or, you know, climb Mt. Everest, but I can still maybe influence peoples' way of thinking by a story that I do, by something I learn about the world.

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.

Eventually, all mentor-disciple relationships are meant to pull apart, usually sometime in the mid-30s. Those who hang on, eventually the mentor drops the disciple, and that's no fun.

No one can control the aging process or the trajectory of illness.

If you begin to think you are solely responsible for keeping your loved one alive and safe, you will eventually find yourself playing God. This phase can develop into an unhealthy, codependent relationship.

In the first phase of shock over, say, your mortgage being called in or your job washed out, it's essential to engage with others and share the fear, release the feelings, do fun things to take your mind off it.

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

When I was immobilized by fear, I might have a panic attack. I've had a couple of panic attacks in my life.

Being a pathfinder is to be willing to risk failure and still go on.

Career-driven millennials are strategic about working obsessively while they are single and earning enough money to afford advanced education. Most are patient enough to wait until 30 or later to develop their dream.

You have a new role: family caregiver. It's a role nobody applies for. You don't expect it. You won't be prepared. You probably won't even identify yourself as a caregiver.

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.

In rough times, pathfinders rely on work, friends, humor and prayer. They develop a support network.

Back in 1968, when I was 30, my entire life blew up. I had a life plan, and it collapsed for no rational reason.

I do think taking the 20s to take the most chances you can is important, because you're not going to hurt anyone else during that time. And if you do have a partner, you need a couple years to rehearse that relationship.

If you're the person living closest to the parent who's going to need help, and you take on the whole role of primary caregiver, you can be pretty sure your sibling who lives farthest away is going to call you and say, 'You don't know what you're doing.' Because they're not on the spot, and they probably feel guilty.

I was devastated when I got the review for my first book. The book came out a couple years before the women's movement broke through, and people were putting it down, asking, 'Why does the woman in this book need to get a divorce? Why can't she just shut up and be happy?'

I found the happiest woman in America is between 50 and 55, is happily married, has made significant progress in her career, and lives in a community where she can easily exercise outside. But the most important single thing was she had her last child before she was 35.

Most women have learned a great deal about how to set goals for our First Adulthood and how to roll with the punches when we hit a rough passage. But we're less prepared for our Second Adulthood as we approach life after retirement, where there are no fixed entrances or exits, and lots of sand into which it is easy to bury our heads.

Married at 23, a mother at 24, and blindsided by divorce at 28, I found myself struggling, like many young women I meet today, to strike a balance between my personal life and my career.

The feminist spirit still lives! It shows most boldly among younger women from the millennial generation.

I did not give my daughter the kind of childhood anybody would want. The vision of the divided loyalty between a mother and father who don't live together and don't share in decisions is a great depravation for children.

I found that female pathfinders generally integrate characteristics commonly associated with being women - like the capacity to be intimate - with 'male' ones like ambition and courage.

We see it in the body, that if you just give the body enough rest and comfort, it has remarkable self-healing capacities. Well, so does the spirit.

My husband, Clay Felker, died 17 years after his first cancer due to secondary conditions that developed from treatment.

One of the ways we women often handicap ourselves is thinking that once we've made a decision or a commitment, we can't change.

The first thing one notices about Jill Abramson is her short stature. The second is her intensity.

We have to move from the unbridled pursuit of self-gain at the expense of others to recovering appreciation for what we gain by caring and sharing with one another.

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.

Over the next few years the boardrooms of America are going to light up with hot flashes.

We really only have two choices. Play it safe, or take a chance. For me, pulling back because of fear has always made me feel worse.

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

The delights of self-discovery are always available.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Transformation also means looking for ways to stop pushing yourself so hard professionally or inviting so much stress.

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

Growth demands a temporary surrender of security.

Be willing to shed parts of your previous life. For example, in our 20s, we wear a mask; we pretend we know more than we do. We must be willing, as we get older, to shed cocktail party phoniness and admit, 'I am who I am.'

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.

I keep returning to the central question facing over-50 women as we move into our Second Adulthood. What are our goals for this stage in our lives?

In 2009, I served as AARP's Ambassador of Caregiving. With a producer and cameraman, I traveled the country for months, interviewing hundreds of caregivers.

Creativity can be described as letting go of certainties.

People in grief need someone to walk with them without judging them.

In the case of my husband, we found that facing a life-threatening illness prodded us to make a dramatic change in our lives.

Spontaneity, the hallmark of childhood, is well worth cultivating to counteract the rigidity that may otherwise set in as we grow older.

Stress overload makes us stupid. Solid research proves it. When we get overstressed, it creates a nasty chemical soup in our brains that makes it hard to pull out of the anxious depressive spiral.

Very few women manage to have it all; certainly not all at once.

It is a paradox that as we reach out prime, we also see there is a place where it finishes.

Family caregiving has become a predictable crisis. Americans are living longer and longer but dying slower and slower.

Like everyone else in the first weeks after the tragedy of 9/11, I was looking frantically for some way to help.

I do think women can have it all - but not all women. If you take daring steps and are smart about it, you can probably have it all. But you might have to wait a while.

Character is what was yesterday and will be tomorrow.

I dare to do things - that's how I survive.

A restless vitality wells up as we approach 30.

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.

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.

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.

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

By listening, by caring, by playing you back to yourself, friends ratify your better instincts and endorse your unique worth. Friends validate you.

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

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.

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.

Frustration is the mother of risk.

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.

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.

In the many times I have seen Hillary [Clinton] speak, she never fails to dazzle audiences by speaking in paragraphs, without notes.

It is Hillary's [Clinton] star power that radiates to every corner of the ballroom. New York bigwigs, such as financial-media impresario Michael Bloomberg, attorney and labor mediator Theodore Kheel, and District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, crane to see her.

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

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

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.

Since nobody upstages Rudolph Giuliani, his will be a Broadway-class show, perhaps his final bravura performance before November 2000, when he hopes to be turned out of the mayor's office by virtue of his election to the United States Senate.

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.

The [Hillary] Clinton campaign was still operating with a White House mentality.

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.

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.

The perceptions of middle age have their own luminosity.

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

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

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

This is a woman [Hillary Clinton] who for many of her 52 years never cared a fig about her appearance, but in the chrysalis of transformation from political wife to independent woman, the jawline has been chiseled, the dominatrix eyebrows weeded, the weight dropped, and the result is a woman who obviously enjoys for the first time being called beautiful.

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.

When you have self-respect, you have enough.

Whether one has natural talent or not, any learning period requires the willingness to suffer uncertainty and embarrassment.

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

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

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