Nancy Gibbs Quotes

In the summer of 2009, in the wake of a crisis in her life, my mother moved from San Diego to San Francisco to live with my 16-year-old daughter and me. My mother was 77. I was 51. Despite a chorus of skepticism from friends - who knew about my upbringing - I was determined to do what I could to help my mother.

Around 1998, I went through lots of pressures and struggles. My children got married within eight months of each other, my son was diagnosed with cancer and went through major surgery and radiation, my mother had five life-threatening hospitalizations where I stayed with her, my husband's dental office burned to the ground.

When I was in senior year of high school, my mom lost her job, we lost our house, and we had to move in with my uncle and my aunt.

Crisis is not a nine-to-five job... Crisis happens when you least expect it.

It may be that the very qualities that help people get ahead are the ones that make them ill-suited for managing crises. It's hard to prepare for the worst when you think you're the best.

Many, including the Canadian and U.S. governments, try to provide family support while also maintaining a hard line about further fuelling terrorism and hostage-taking through ransom payments ... Still, try telling that to a mother, or a father, or a husband or wife caught in the powerless agony of standing by.

This may sound trite, but bad things happen to good people, and when you're facing terrorism, natural disaster, you can have every wonderful plan in place, but I am a realist.

When my mother died, my father was in a crisis, my sister was in a crisis, everyone was in a crisis. I went round the night my mother was lying in the kitchen, and I organised everything, from the undertaker to the funeral... I looked after everybody, I sorted it all out and I've done so ever since.

Nobody's life is wrapped up neatly in a bow.

It's expensive to raise a child with special needs, which people don't even think about. Emotionally it can be a struggle, but financially it's really rough.

But everyone gets burnt, don't they? Certain things are outside of your control. I suppose the only thing you can learn as a director is to not put yourself into situations where it can get outside of your control. And that's what happened.

I've spent a great deal of time over the past decade as a caregiver for various family members. It gives me a perspective on the struggles that many New Yorkers face with illness, disability, health care, insurance difficulties, and trying to work with and also take care of family members.

My dad worked all sorts of jobs when I was growing up and finally ended up as a surveyor; my mum delivers meals to old folk around where we live. We didn't have much money when I was growing up, but I had a very happy childhood.

Life is an unending stream of extenuating circumstances.

When I was nine years old, my family lost our home, and the six of us moved into my grandparents' converted garage.

When I was a sophomore in college, my father called me at the fraternity. He told me he no longer had the funds to pay for college. If I wanted to continue, I would have to do it on my own.

The fact is that it is reasonable for us to say that there is going to be an emergency that happens in this country that we cannot budget for. Katrina is an example.

As it has been told to me, my Dad had some kind of deal with Dick Clark. But when we got here, that fell through. So we were out here with no job, no furniture, no food.

Then my mother had several strokes and my father, who was 85, couldn't handle it, so Donna came back and we went through the same thing here. She lives in Mill Valley; her group is organizing this event.

There will always be days when we have to race to catch up to events we did not foresee, not because somebody is asleep at the switch, but because what’s going on is so complicated.

Crises there will continue to be ... Threats of new kinds will always appear.

In the real world, it doesn't always go your way like it can on a television show.

Secretary Clinton is tough, smart, and understands better than any candidate the challenges that parents are talking about around dinner tables and keeping families up at night.

Every week, there's a different twist and turn you're not going to see coming, and how you handle that is important.

The laboratory where we stored all our negatives went bankrupt overnight following the Asian economic crisis in 1997. So, on short notice, we had to retrieve all the materials in the middle of the night before the debtor-receiver took over the laboratory the next morning.