Gail Sheehy Quotes

We all retire one day. If we want to, if we don't want to.

Maybe wanting to retire is my ambition.

I tell people retirement isn't what you think. You are going to sit around and waste your life, you can only golf so much. To stay young, you have to stay in the mix.

For me retiring wasn't hard once I knew that that was the decision I was going to make.

The decision to retire was very easy. The timing had come to the point where it was very clear that my time was up.

If you fix your sense of self to your job, then you're heading for disaster.

I am a very positive person, but you don't get taught how to deal with the end of your career. Never.

You get to a certain age, and you feel like you know who you are, and how you fit into the world, and how the world sort of perceives you. And you get pretty set in that. And then things can happen that can turn it upside.

By the time ordinary life asserted itself once more, I would feel I had already lived for a while in some other lifetime, that I had even taken over someone else's life.

I really feel sorry for new generation. It's hard to find backbone. I never had crisis of identity. But I think many Americans have it.

It was sort of an experiment to try to leave the violin. Can I be a real person without this thing? It was a big part of my identity.

It's not easy to retire at 31. In one respect I was glad I was done. But after a few years of having fun, I got a little restless. When you're 33, 34, and you don't have a focus, you can get kind of lost. As a man, you feel a little bit unfulfilled.

I am not a player anymore.

I don't need much more money, and I thought that when I retired that nobody would want to talk to me anymore. Then I did, and people still want to talk to me.

I always thought that there was going to be life after baseball, and so I designed that in my life I would have other interests after baseball that I would be able to step into. And I didn't realize the grip that baseball had on me and on my family.

Really, I don't know what I'd do with myself if I retire. Wash dishes?

When I turned 40, subconsciously, life was a blank sheet. Before, it was disjointed, and I was very displaced and quite mad, but it was a brilliant time. Everyone thinks I must have been unhappy.

Retiring is one thing. Being retired is something else altogether.

I have not cared for money, and I enjoy working. Money comes my way. People work hard so they get enough money. Or they work hard so they don't have to work hard later in life. But though I don't need money, I still work hard because I like what I am doing.

Retirement from work has depressed many a man and hastened his death.

There comes a point in many people's lives when they can no longer play the role they have chosen for themselves. When that happens, we are like actors finding that someone has changed the play.

You know a lot of times wrestlers get too full of themselves. They can't separate themselves from the characters. They get used to the excitement, the energy, the lifestyle and the money and with a lot of these guys, when it stops, they self-destruct.

Like lots of women who marry young and find themselves mothers by the time they're 25, I felt I no longer had an identity.

I don't want the money. I don't want the drama. I just want to do my show. I want to have fun again.

When I wasn't working I didn't know what to do with myself and sort of didn't exist, in a way, when I wasn't working, so I was like two different people. I am not like that anymore.