Topic Sentence: Inspiring Words from 18 Wise Women

Changing Chapters and Sharing Advice

Photo by Elisa Calvet B. on Unsplash

When did everyone get so wise?! Here are a few powerful quotes to get you through whatever you’re going through today. Check back for new essays regularly on Between Chapters inspired by the upcoming book. Share your story here.

Karson Brown (Karson brown)

• “What astonishes me isn’t that I wrote a book. It’s that the chapter I feared most, the one that began when my children left home, created a space for me to finish it. The very loss I thought might undo me became the thing that returned me to myself.”

• “You do not need to know what comes next. You do not need certainty. You simply need enough faith to keep moving forward. Sometimes the chapter that feels like loss is actually transformation. Sometimes what looks like an ending is an invitation. And sometimes the chapter you would have fought hardest to avoid becomes the one that finally brings you home to yourself.”

Sheryl Berk

• “What started as self-doubt is slowly turning into something else, something that feels a lot like purpose.”

• “What began as a leap of faith has led me here to a place of power I didn’t know I was still allowed to claim.”

Maureen Wallace

• “I hope I never again take a pain-free day for granted. I hope I dive back into being a functional parent and wife. I hope I leave this chapter far behind but reflect on it with gratitude for a morning punctuated by the usual gentle urges rather than piercing pain. I’m so ready for that next chapter. So, so ready.”

Wendy Selig-Prieb

• “In an age where we’re all striving for more authentic and deeper interactions, there is no better way to achieve this than to share your stories and experiences.”

Dena Moes

• “It is my moment to celebrate moving through the hardships of past difficulties, becoming wiser, and choosing the miracle of this later-in-life love.”

Lisa Grunberger

• “Change comes slowly. And meaning from life events and transitions comes even more slowly. You cannot rush meaning.”

• “I learned the heart can expand like a womb to contain multitudes. I learned that the divisions we make between life and death, good and evil, nature and nurture, limit who we think we are and who the world is.”

• “Always stay open to the unexpected consequences to your actions. Life is a vaster mystery than we can ever know.”

Diane Bergner

• “Becoming the author of my own narrative, instead of the manager of everyone else’s, resonates deeply now.”

• “It takes courage to leave a chapter that made sense to other people and enter one that may only make partial sense, at best, to you at first.”

• “My advice to anyone changing chapters, or trying to survive a difficult one, is to pay attention to what keeps calling you. Not what impresses other people. Not what looks good on paper. Not what you have always done simply because you know how to do it — and can do it well. Pay attention to the thing that makes you feel awake and alive again.”

• “Don’t mistake a quieter chapter for a lesser one. Some chapters do not arrive with fireworks. They arrive as a sentence, a whisper, a blank page, a strange new freedom. They arrive when you realize the life you built still matters, but it no longer has to be the whole story.”

Jennifer Sargent

• “Take whatever steps you need in order to be able to breathe. You can’t survive with the feeling of an elephant sitting on your chest all the time.”

Pearl Adler Saban

• “It’s time for me to truly consider this chapter of grief and recognize how it’s manifested itself in my life – and more importantly, what I can do about it.”

• “A chapter can have many pages or few lines… May each chapter that we have gone through, that we are going through, and that we will go through help to strengthen us … so that we can easily turn to the next page that awaits.”

Jamie Gallo

• “I have learned that we can exit this world unexpectedly and that there is a finite amount of time to take that trip, take that chance, or be the person you always wanted to be. Fear and ego have lessened their hold on me as I embrace being present and let go of worry.”

Wendy Gold Rossi

• “My role as the workhorse employee, the family’s financial and emotional backbone, can finally be placed on the shelf, traded for the creative artistic soul I’d put there so long ago. This place, this time, this reset is for me.”

• “Allowing my imagination to direct my future didn’t happen in a single leap. It came through tiny shifts, learning to trust and advocate for myself.”

Jessica Reid

• “I’d no longer be steering the ship but, instead, serving as an occasional fueling station and port in a storm. Vital functions, yes, but not nearly as instinctual and gratifying as being at the helm.”

Jennifer Young

• “I did not realize until I was standing there, someone’s guest in a life my daughter had built entirely without me, how much I needed someone to take the clipboard out of my hands. It was freeing in a way I did not see coming.”

• “I could finally feel it: this chapter of motherhood was actually closing. And to my sentimental surprise, I could finally hold that.”

• “The next chapter doesn’t announce itself. It just shows up in a karaoke bar at midnight, singing along with three generations of families and friends, a slow realization that you are not standing at the edge of something. You are standing at the start all over again.”

Mihal Levy

• “I don’t quite know who I am after spending decades becoming who I needed to be.”

Kay Paschal

• “It may well be up to each of us, in the chapter of our own senior years, to find the wisdom necessary to enjoy and balance all of it.”

Lisa Schor Babin

• “For once, in this slow transition to the next chapter, we face a future that has no script or guardrails, and even fewer guidelines, but with a finiteness that scares us. In short, in this chapter that’s coming at us quickly, we face our own mortality.”

• “While I have a tendency to allow worry and irrational fear to sideline me, I know to pull myself back to that morning kiss that simultaneously bears witness to years of collective memories and gives promise to a wondrous future.”

Kristi Kasper

• “I told him that if we didn’t do this we would always wonder where in life it would have led us, what we might have learned about ourselves and what experiences we might have had.”

Elyse Rosenstock

• “What started as a creative passion has become a platform for storytelling, connection, and purpose. Each collaboration, each bracelet, each conversation reminds me that it’s never too late to dream bigger or create something meaningful.”

• “Marriage enters new seasons too. After years together, there are opportunities to rediscover one another, to create new traditions, and to embrace new beginnings. Relationships evolve, and there is something powerful about choosing each other again and again through every stage of life.”

• “I’ve learned that the greatest gift I can give them isn’t having all the answers. It’s reminding them that they are capable of finding their own.”