"Gail Sheehy" is an American author, journalist, and lecturer. She is the author of seventeen books, including Passages (1976), named by the Library of Congress one of the ten most influential books of our times. Sheehy has written biographies and character studies of major twentieth-century leaders, including Hillary Clinton, both Presidents Bush, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. Her latest book, Daring: My Passages, (Sept. 2014) is a memoir.

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

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

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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Creativity can be described as letting go of certainties.

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Growth demands a temporary surrender of security.

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With each passage of human growth we must shed a protective structure [like a hardy crustacean]. 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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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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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.

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