Gail Sheehy Quotes

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.

Don't hold together what must fall apart. The familiar life crumbles so the new life can begin.

Sometimes you have to lose yourself 'fore you can find anything.

It's hard to watch your life unfold, and sad. Life changes.

Disenchantment, whether it is a minor disappointment or a major shock, is the signal that things are moving into transition in our lives.

Everybody's constantly being destroyed and rebuilding themselves, some more drastically than others.

The transition was difficult. It's hard to stop something that you've enjoyed and that has been very rewarding.

It will be difficult to let go but it is going to happen sooner rather than later in my case.

I've let a lot of things go, and obviously football is one of them. I think the hardest thing to let go is your self-image. That's what I'm working on now.

Life is change, to cease to change is to cease to live; yet if you may shed a tear beside the death-bed of an old friend, let not your heart be silent on the dissolving of a faith.

Endings are scary and foreign. They split you up emotionally and put you in a place where you don't know what's going to happen next. But with every end of the world, there is a new world that follows.

'Orphee' is, for me, about changes: about moving to a new city, leaving behind an old life in Copenhagen, and building a new one in Berlin - about the death of old relationships and the birth of new ones.

It can be painful leaving parts of yourself behind. Change and shuffling off your previous skin is traumatic, but it can be done.

At different times in life, I've felt like it's time to say goodbye from some form of myself that's been hanging around for a while - you just feel this urge to move on, like a herd of antelope. They're just standing there in a field eating grass. You feel like that as a person sometimes. Where's it's just time to move on.

It's definitely tough to get up and walk away from something you have been a part of for so long. But it's part of life.

It’s part of growing up, I suppose…you always have to leave something behind you.

Rebirth is almost impossible without the darkness.....I tell myself I am experiencing the death of myself as mother, the death of myself as a younger woman -- precious old lives going by the wayside. Of course, I should let myself grieve. To deny the grief is to squander a transforming and radiant possibility.

Sometimes you have to lose everything in order to gain yourself.

Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long cherished or a privilege he has long possessed that he is set free - he has set himself free - for higher dreams, for greater privileges.

We are continuously living a new life, and when the old and the new do not fit nicely together, the old - no longer able to contain the new - should be discarded.

You have to let go of who you were, to become who you will be.

I have had to give up so much, so many selves and lives already. I have grown up and out of the rubble of my old lives, of things and people I have cared for.

The moment of change is the only poem.

I'm the person that I always was, but in terms of how I approach my living, I'm not the same person at all. At all. I've buried a child, I've ended a marriage, and the grandson that I was raising is now grown. My family has totally shifted.

Don't grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.