Top 60 Gail Sheehy Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If we don’t change, we don’t grow. If we don’t grow, we aren’t really living.”

— Gail Sheehy

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

— Gail Sheehy

3. “Growth demands a temporary surrender of security.”

— Gail Sheehy

4. “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

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

— Gail Sheehy

6. “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

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

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

— Gail Sheehy

11. “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

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

— Gail Sheehy

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

— Gail Sheehy

14. “Frustration is the mother of risk.”

— Gail Sheehy

15. “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

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

— Gail Sheehy

17. “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

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

— Gail Sheehy

19. “The delights of self-discovery are always available.”

— Gail Sheehy

20. “A restless vitality wells up as we approach 30.”

— Gail Sheehy

21. “The perceptions of middle age have their own luminosity.”

— Gail Sheehy

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

— Gail Sheehy

23. “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

24. “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

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

— Gail Sheehy

26. “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

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

— Gail Sheehy

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “When you have self-respect, you have enough.”

— Gail Sheehy

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

— Gail Sheehy

33. “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

34. “If there’s something about me you don’t like, just tell me,” says the newlywed anxious to please. “I’ll change it.” If he or she is not forthcoming with such an offer, the other one is determined to change it for the partner. “He may drink a little too much now,” the bride confides to her friend, “but I’ll reform him.” Examination.”

— Gail Sheehy

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

— Gail Sheehy

36. “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

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

— Gail Sheehy

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

— Gail Sheehy

39. “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.”

— Gail Sheehy

40. “The other real forces urging young people into marriages generally sift down to one of the following: the need for safety, the need to fill some vacancy in themselves, the need to get away from home, the need for prestige or practicality. Safety.”

— Gail Sheehy

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

— Gail Sheehy

42. “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.”

— Gail Sheehy

43. “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.”

— Gail Sheehy

44. “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

45. “Creativity could be described as letting go of certainties.”

— Gail Sheehy

46. “Further discomfort from these new realities afflicts men who expected to reach a certain level by dint of their white maleness but who now have to make room for women and minorities as well as their own generational bulge. The old boy network doesn’t help them much anymore.”

— Gail Sheehy

47. “Doubts immobilize. Believing that we are independent and competent enough to master the external tasks constantly fortifies us in our attempts to become so. It is only later we discover that logic cannot penetrate the loneliness of the human soul. One.”

— Gail Sheehy

48. “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.”

— Gail Sheehy

49. “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.”

— Gail Sheehy

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

— Gail Sheehy