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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

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Gail Sheehy
Age: 83 †
Born: 1936
Born: November 27
Died: 2020
Died: August 24
Author
Biographer
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Mamaroneck
New York
Gail Henion Sheehy
Never
Middle
Numbing
Age
Ambivalence
Action
Demonstrated
Mother
Imagined
Thought
Pulling
Best
Younger
Even
Defeat
Way
Surprise
Cartwheels

More quotes by Gail Sheehy

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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.
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by operating on the principle of human and material obsolescence, America eats her history alive.
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Changes are not only possible and predictable, but to deny them is to be an accomplice to one's own unnecessary vegetation.
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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.
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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.
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If every day is an awakening, you will never grow old. You will just keep growing.
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Although there are many trial marriages... there is no such thing as a trial child.
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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.
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If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we are not really living.
Gail Sheehy
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The perceptions of middle age have their own luminosity.
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The [Hillary] Clinton campaign was still operating with a White House mentality.
Gail Sheehy
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A restless vitality wells up as we approach 30.
Gail Sheehy
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Leaders are people we as followers want to regard with awe as the fullest flowering of our own possibilities.
Gail Sheehy
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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
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When you have self-respect, you have enough.
Gail Sheehy
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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.
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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
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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
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In the many times I have seen Hillary [Clinton] speak, she never fails to dazzle audiences by speaking in paragraphs, without notes.
Gail Sheehy
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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