Redmond Quotes

A WOMAN SHOULD HAVE .... enough money within her control to move out and rent a place of her own even if she never wants to or needs to... A WOMAN SHOULD HAVE .... something perfect to wear if the employer or date of her dreams wants to see her in an hour... A WOMAN SHOULD HAVE ... a youth she's content to leave behind.... A WOMAN SHOULD HAVE .... a past juicy enough that she's looking forward to retelling it in her old age.... A WOMAN SHOULD HAVE ..... a set of screwdrivers, a cordless drill, and a black lace bra... A WOMAN SHOULD HAVE .... one friend who always makes her laugh... and one who lets her cry... A WOMAN SHOULD HAVE .... a good piece of furniture not previously owned by anyone else in her family... A WOMAN SHOULD HAVE .... eight matching plates, wine glasses with stems, and a recipe for a meal that will make her guests feel honored... A WOMAN SHOULD HAVE .... a feeling of control over her destiny... EVERY WOMAN SHOULD KNOW... how to fall in love without losing herself.. EVERY WOMAN SHOULD KNOW... HOW TO QUIT A JOB, BREAK UP WITH A LOVER, AND CONFRONT A FRIEND WITHOUT RUINING THE FRIENDSHIP... EVERY WOMAN SHOULD KNOW... when to try harder... and WHEN TO WALK AWAY... EVERY WOMAN SHOULD KNOW... that she can't change the length of her calves, the width of her hips, or the nature of her parents.. EVERY WOMAN SHOULD KNOW... that her childhood may not have been perfect...but it's over... EVERY WOMAN SHOULD KNOW... what she would and wouldn't do for love or more... EVERY WOMAN SHOULD KNOW... how to live alone... even if she doesn't like it... EVERY WOMAN SHOULD KNOW... whom she can trust, whom she can't, and why she shouldn't take it personally... EVERY WOMAN SHOULD KNOW... where to go... be it to her best friend's kitchen table... or a charming inn in the woods... when her soul needs soothing... EVERY WOMAN SHOULD KNOW... what she can and can't accomplish in a day... a month...and a year...

Every woman should have a youth she's content to leave behind and a past juicy enough that she's looking forward to telling it in her old age

A WOMAN SHOULD HAVE ..... a set of screwdrivers, a cordless drill, and a black lace bra...

A WOMAN SHOULD HAVE .... one friend who always makes her laugh... and one who lets her cry...

All the eggs a woman will every carry form in her ovaries while she is a four-month-old foetus in the womb of her mother. This means our cellular life as en egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our grandmother's womb, and she in turn formed within the womb of her grandmother. We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother's blood before she herself is born, and this pulse is the thread of blood that runs all the way back through the grandmothers to the first mother.

You wouldn’t believe the scope for mischief that the Beast of Redmond unintentionally builds into its Office software by letting it execute macros that have unlimited access to the hardware. I remember a particular post-prandial PowerPoint presentation where I was one of only two survivors (and the other wasn’t entirely human). However, this is the first time I’ve seen a Word document eat a man’s soul.

Lyon Redmond was either a man on a pilgrimage in search of salvation, or a man out to burn on the pyre of his own love for a woman. Regardless, he still suffered.

I know what you think of me, Miles. I know what you--have thought of me. But I have a heart. I do have a heart. I just cannot afford to use it. Don't you see? Why can't you see this? Whereas you--may play at all of this as much as you like. There will always be someone for you. And that is the difference. I cannot afford to use my heart. And you--you choose not to use yours.' - Cynthia Brightley to Miles Redmond

Ah, Lyon: the Achilles’ heel of this family. She had forgotten about Lyon, and about disappearing Redmonds.

The dangerously high level of stupidity surplus was once again the lead story in The Owl that morning. The reason for the crisis was clear: Prime Minister Redmond van de Poste and his ruling Commonsense Party had been discharging their duties with a reckless degree of responsibility that bordered on inspired sagacity. Instead of drifting from one crisis to the next and appeasing the nation with a steady stream of knee-jerk legislation and headline-grabbing but arguably pointless initiatives, they had been resolutely building a raft of considered long-term plans that concentrated on unity, fairness and tolerance. It was a state of affairs deplored by Mr. Alfredo Traficcone, leader of the opposition Prevailing Wind Party, who wanted to lead the nation back to the safer ground of uniformed stupidity.

Babies are such fascinating creatures," said Anne dreamily. "They are what I heard somebody at Redmond call 'terrific bundles of potentialities.' Think of it, Katherine . . . Homer must have been a baby once . . . a baby with dimples and great eyes full of light . . . he couldn't have been blind then, of course.

A cosmology that admits of only one male god limits women’s capacity to envision their full potential as human beings.

...[the birds] were the yellow of all yellows, the kind of yellow that every other yellow secretly wishes to be.

I have learned that everyone else in the world is boring except you.

Before him and since he’d gone away, she’d either contracted or ever-so-subtly contorted her very being to accommodate nearly everybody else. She was only ever wholly herself with him.

Miss Redmond is aging, and will never marry, and will die smelling of attics.

then why sell?" James had asked. "have to," Redmond said. "if I want to get married and have children and live in this city, I have to." "since when do you want to get married and have kids?" James asked. "since now. Life gets boring when you're middle-aged. You can't keep doing the same thing. You look like an asshole. You ever notice that?" Redmond had asked.

May I see your dance card?” “Don’t you believe me?” She presented it to him with a flourish. He ran his fingers down the list of names. “Hmm . . . Waterburn? Bastard. D’Andre. Definitely a worthless bastard. Lord Camber, a thoroughgoing bastard. Lord Michaelson? Bastard. Peter Cheswick? Bast—” She snatched it from him, laughing. “I wouldn’t dance a waltz with you, anyway, Lord Dryden.” “No?” “You might accidentally lock eyes with Lisbeth Redmond, stumble, and fling me across the room to avoid crushing my feet.

Women need the archetypal image of a Divine Female. We need to reconnect with the inherent sacredness of woman as creator and nourisher, rather than accept a vision of ourselves as less-than-divine inferiors.

Because drumming was recognized as an ancient source and symbol of the power of female technicians of the sacred, drumming was banned. Henceforth divinity was to be exclusively masculine. The suppression of women was directly linked to the suppression of the goddess.” - Layne Redmond, When the Drummers were Women

Redmond Howard, a politically aware witness to the Rising and a critic of the rebels, wrote in its aftermath: 'There never was, I believe, an Irish crime -- if crime it can be called -- which had not its roots in an English folly.

I thought it would be a good thing to follow John Redmond’s words. I thought for my mother’s sake, her gentle soul, for the sake of my own children, I might go out and fight for to save Europe so that we might have the Home Rule in Ireland in the upshot. I came out to fight for a country that doesn’t exist, and now, Willie, mark my words, it never will.

It is often said that the first sound we hear in the womb is our mother's heartbeat. Actually, the first sound to vibrate our newly developed hearing apparatus is the pulse of our mother's blood through her veins and arteries. We vibrate to that primordial rhythm even before we have ears to hear. Before we were conceived, we existed in part as an egg in our mother's ovary. All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries while she is a four-month-old fetus in the womb of her mother. This means our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our grandmother's womb and she in turn formed within the womb of her grandmother. We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother's blood before she herself is born. And this pulse is the thread of blood that runs all the way back through the grandmothers to the first mother. We all share the blood of the first mother. We are truly children of one blood.

Protect our children from failure, is impossible; Teach them how to get up can make the difference

It’s…” She couldn’t finish. “Don’t try, Miss Redmond,” he agreed, shading his eyes. “There are honestly no suitable words, so we shall not fault you for failing to find them. Nothing makes a man feel more like God than sailing a ship over the sea with no land in sight. And nothing makes a man feel less like a God than clinging to a shred of ship exploded by lightning in a storm.

Here was a group of guys that would look right at home at a table in the cafeteria of the Googleplex, the Microsoft Redmond campus, or a science fiction convention, but they were in Medieval England, dressed as wizards, and they were all looking at Martin.

He began to stand, and saw Lyon stiffen, poised to do whatever he needed to do. He, like Lyon, could throw himself on a pyre, too. Because fire cleansed. She’d won, and he’d lost. It had stopped mattering. Her happiness was indistinguishable from his own. No matter what became of him, he wanted her to know he loved her. “You’d best get out of here, Redmond. Your secret is safe with me.” Lyon’s eyes flared in wary surprise. He froze. And his smile, when it came, was slow, and crooked, and he looked very like Lavay when Lavay was being insufferably knowing. “Ah. You do love her more than life. Splendid. And that, my dear Lord Flint, is what I came here today to discover.” Whatever he felt was between him and Violet. “Go before I change my mind, Redmond.

People often say to me: Oy! Get out of my garden.

There’s an old saying in the relational database world: on a long enough timeline, all fields become optional.

I'm a woman. I understand this. What's the reason for it to hold me back?

Oh, I’m bowed, but unbroken.

no one finds a braggart wise. And once I no longer thought of listening as “waiting to talk,” I began to have more meaningful conversations.

Charlie Redmond drank alone, but for his demons, at a crowded table at the back.

Eli Redmond is the breeze that makes a hurricane form in the Atlantic.

Charlie Redmond? This man here? The only man I ever

Very well,” she said after a moment. “Here is how I see that loyalty and love are the same: You would lay down your life for someone for reasons of both love and loyalty. But loyalty implies dependence, doesn’t it? For instance, dogs are loyal. It also implies indebtedness. For instance, servants are loyal.” “It also implies integrity. And honor. And—” “Steadfastness,” she completed, with only a hint of irony. “So you see them as absolutes then, Miss Redmond? Love means to be willing to die for someone, and loyalty perhaps the same?” “How can they be otherwise?

Most of us fear that in growing old, we’ll become a shell of ourselves. But, of course, it’s the youthful versions of ourselves that are our shells; we must leave them behind like a snakeskin. We must grow out of ourselves to grow beyond our old limits, or else risk being suffocated by the sediment of our own history.

With apologies to the folks in Redmond, I’ll end on another Microsoft joke because it makes the point well (a point that applies everywhere, not just at Microsoft): A helicopter was flying around above Seattle when a malfunction disabled all of its electronic navigation and communications equipment. The clouds were so thick that the pilot couldn’t tell where he was. Finally, the pilot saw a tall building, flew toward it, circled, and held up a handwritten sign that said WHERE AM I? in large letters. People in the tall building quickly responded to the aircraft, drawing their own large sign: YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER. The pilot smiled, looked at his map, determined the route to Sea-Tac Airport, and landed safely. After they were on the ground, the copilot asked the pilot how he had done it. “I knew it had to be the Microsoft building,” he said, “because they gave me a technically correct but completely useless answer.

Which was why he reflexively turned when a flash of iridescence caught his eye. His first thought was: Morpho rhetenor Helena. The extraordinary tropical butterfly with wings of shifting colors: blues, lavenders, greens. It proved to be a woman’s skirt. The color was blue, but by the light of the legion of overhead candles, he saw purples and even greens shivering in its weave. A bracelet of pale stones winked around one wrist, a circlet banded her dark head. The chandelier struck little beams from that, too. She’s altogether too shiny for a woman, he decided, and began to turn away. Which was when she tipped her face up into the light. Everything stopped. The beat of his heart, the pump of his lungs, the march of time. Seconds later, thankfully, it all resumed. Much more violently than previously. And then absurd notions roman-candled in his mind. His palms ached to cradle her face—it was a kitten’s face, broad and fair at the brow, stubborn at the chin. She had kitten’s eyes, too: large and a bit tilted and surely they weren’t actually the azure of calm southern seas? Surely he, Miles Redmond, hadn’t entertained such a florid thought? Her eyebrows were wicked: fine, slanted, very dark. Her hair was probably brown, but it was as though he’d never learned the word “brown.” Burnished. Silk. Copper. Azure. Delicate. Angel. Hallelujah. Suddenly these were the only words he knew.

For you see, Captain Flint, I, too, never settle for less than what I want. Or never thought I possibly could. I’m a Redmond. If only you truly understood what this means. So I set out to reorder the world in a way I thought would make me worthy of her love. But my quest has changed me in ways I never anticipated, and I’m not the man who once loved that girl. There’s much more to my journey yet. And here’s a bitter irony: I’ve found in becoming heroic, in becoming worthy of her, I’ve painted myself into an untenable corner. I’ve more work to do to prove someone’s innocence or guilt.

Cynthia wondered how anyone could withstand this sort of happiness. But no doubt no one had ever before been as happy as she was at this moment, so there couldn't possibly be any precedent. She would have to show them all how to do it by surviving it and marrying Miles Redmond and living to a ripe old age.

Did you ever get a whistling-type pain out the left lung, Mr. Redmond? Is it one of those sinister-type pains that you’ve never had before, Mr. Hearne? ’Tis, yeah. Give it time, it’ll be like an old pal to you. Maurice leans in to his friend, and he speaks with fear and very quietly now. I’m fifty-one years to fucken Jesus, Charlie.

They merely acknowledge human urges, erotic and monetary, and get on with it. Canadian author Mont Redmond put it best when he wrote that, in Thailand, “Anything too big to be swept under the carpet is automatically counted as furniture.” The Thais might not like the furniture, might constantly be bumping into it, but they don’t deny its existence.

At the end, as at the beginning, stands the archetypal power of the Divine Feminine—the goddess. She is our future as she was our past. With her drum in hand, playing her sacramental rhythms, women can once again take their place in the world as technicians of the sacred. In the pulse of my drum, in the beat of my heart, I erect an alter to her forever.

It’s not right to spend money you don’t have to perpetuate a lie about who you are.

So, as women, we’ve got to be pretty damn amazing to realize early on that physical perfection is neither achievable nor useful, and that all that fixing can be toxic.

Making peace with my past was the first step; being grateful for it was the second. Now, at last, I can appreciate the woman those experiences created: me.

I learned not to invest too much in a relationship before I really know how the other person feels.

Neither of the boys understand what's going on," The driver's mother noted. "Who does?" the young poet asked himself.

[W]hy should you wait for a knight in shining armor to give you a ride when you can afford to buy the horse yourself?

I want nothing. Oh wait, I want you to get the couch out of my office, and then after that I want and need nothing from you again.

I had never thought more that we were two halves of the same girl.

No. 2’s infamous opening line is a double gambit: the Village does not really want information, of course, only obedience. (From their point of view, information is an exchange-value, not a use-value). In fact, it is No. 6 who truly wants information: information on who No. 1 is, where the Village really is, which side runs it, and how it might be possible to escape.

I now believe in growing old gratefully, not gracefully. I haven’t found the secret to life, or love, or eternal youth. But I do know now that youth is not the blossom but the bud, and that though one cannot always be young and wild, if you are willing to learn, to grow, to outrun the mileposts of your own wildest dreams, you can always be winsome and lucky, lovely and free.

Love isn’t always enough. It’s a hard lesson because we’re raised to believe that it is—it’s in every story we hear. But just because you love somebody and they love you back doesn’t mean your relationship makes sense or that it’s a good one for you both to be in. Having chemistry with someone is important, yes, but the most important thing is that the person you’re with makes you happy.

You know when you’re in yoga and you’re looking around, thinking, Wow, I wish I were that flexible, or How come she can hold that pose? Well, my friend has a saying: “Stay on your own mat.” Not physically, but mentally. In life, we’re all made differently: our families, our frames, our personalities and talents. Appreciate how you were made, and stay on your mat. That’s where happiness lies.

It’s rare that I have a boyfriend- that only happens if I fall in love. I’ve noticed that people who are never in a relationship just to be in a relationship keep their childlike spark because they don’t end up settling for things that make them unhappy, and they never feel as if they took less than what was out there for them. So for me, being single is what I do, and falling in love is the exception.

It was back in 2050 when Governor Schultz decided that all the Barrens needed was better lighting. At the cost of uncounted millions of nuyen, the city engineers—with Lone Star and Metroplex Guard units running cover—had installed high-intensity carbon arc lights everywhere they could get to safely. The residents of the Barrens had responded in typically warm Redmond manner by shooting most of them out.

There they clambered onto a radiator and peered out the high window through their tears to watch a car leaving with their baby. The marks on the radiator from their shoes were visible up to as late as 2017.

Love is like a loaded musket,” he mused. “And yet it’s available to everyone. It’s always . . .” He mimed thrusting out a gun. “‘Here you are! Try not to kill yourself or others with it.’ They oughtn’t allow young people near it.

If there is a single ‘smoking gun’ piece of evidence that destroys all the excuses the nuns make, such as underfunding, lack of understanding of hygiene, and victim blaming, then the Castlepollard mortality rates are that evidence.

I think I’ve lived long enough to learn that it’s not where I come from but where I’m going that matters. Others and what they’ve done to me do not define who I am. I am the one who decides how my character is shaped . . . for better or for worse.

I always say I was one woman before his death and have been another ever since. The one before thought she could fix anything if she just worked hard enough. The woman after was forced to accept that sometimes life has plans for us and our loved ones that are far, far beyond our grasp.

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received was from my grandmother, who said, “A woman always has to keep something of her own, even if it’s a jar of quarters.” The other was from my agent, another wise woman, who told me twenty years ago: “You don’t have to tell everything you know.

But I have learned that love is the one area where women should give themselves a break and cut bait. Men are better at that—if a guy isn’t feeling great about the relationship, he will leave and not look back. As women, we’re more analytical and more accommodating. We tend to hang in there and try harder. But if you’re with a dude who’s texting other girls, bye-bye.

you were thirty, you were a failure,” she told the audience. “And now a lot of young women think that if they aren’t seriously successful before thirty, they’re a failure. So I want to say to you that there is life and dreams and surprises after thirty—and forty, and fifty, and sixty, and seventy-seven! Believe me, life is one long surprise. And you can’t plan it, but you can prepare.

It is often said that the first sound we hear in the womb is our mother’s heartbeat. Actually, the first sound to vibrate our newly developed hearing apparatus is the pulse of our mother’s blood through her veins and arteries. We vibrate to that primordial rhythm even before we have ears to hear. Before we were conceived, we existed in part as an egg in our mother’s ovary. All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries while she is a four-month-old fetus in the womb of her mother. This means our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our grandmother’s womb and she in turn formed within the womb of her grandmother. We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother’s blood before she herself is born …. Layne Redmond, When the Drummers Were Women

Of course!” he said. “I’d love to chat, but I’ve got to get this email out.” He grabbed some headphones from around his neck, put them over his ears, and returned to his laptop. And get this—his headphones weren’t even plugged in! They were those sound-canceling ones! The whole ride to Redmond he never spoke to me again. Now, Audrey, for the past five years we always figured Bernadette was the ghastly one. Turns out her husband is as rude and antisocial as she is! I was so miffed that when I got to work, I Googled Bernadette Fox. (Something I can’t believe I’ve waited until now to do, considering our unhealthy obsession with her!) Everyone knows Elgin Branch is team leader of Samantha 2 at Microsoft. But when I looked her up, nothing appeared. The only Bernadette Fox is some architect in California. I checked all combinations of her name—Bernadette Branch, Bernadette Fox-Branch. But our Bernadette, Bee’s mom, doesn’t exist as far as the Internet is concerned.

How could I sacrifice her for the sake of Charlotte? I was getting tired of Charlotte, with her intact virtue and her tidy ways. Wearing her was like wearing a hair shirt, she made me itchy, I wanted her to fall into a mud puddle, have menstrual cramps, sweat, burp, fart. Even her terrors were too pure, her faceless murderers, her corridors, her mazes and forbidden doors. Perhaps in the new life, I thought, the life to come, I would be less impressed with capes and more with holes in stockings, hangnails, body odors and stomach problems. Maybe I should try to write a real novel, about someone who worked in an office and had tawdry, unsatisfying affairs. But that was impossible, it was against my nature. I longed for happy endings, I needed the feeling of release when everything turned out right and I could scatter joy like rice all over my characters and dismiss them into bliss. Redmond would kiss Charlotte so that her eyeballs rolled right back into her head, and then they could both vanish. When would they be joyful enough, when would my life be my own?

sure what happened after the accident was client-protected,” he told Mazzone. By their silence, “Markham and Gargan were taking the big fall to protect Ted Kennedy.” Paul Redmond doubted the lawyer-client issue would even arise at the inquest. “People were walking around Boston whaling the bee-jesus out of Paul Markham and Joe Gargan for not reporting the accident—that was so unfair. Here were two guys, good lawyers and fine men, made to look like stooges or worse by the press.” Gargan had told him he could not have reported an accident in which a driver faced a possible manslaughter charge, Redmond said. “It’s no secret Joe was a dear friend. When I left the U.S. Attorney’s office, Paul Markham took my spot.” A week before the inquest, Redmond bumped into Gargan in the elevator of the building in which both had law offices. The Boiler Room girls were “upstairs,” Redmond said. “They haven’t seen you in a long time. I think they’d like to say hello.” Gargan went straight to Redmond’s office for “a nice reunion, a pleasant chat. Very friendly.” There was no discussion about the inquest. Gargan did not want to become involved in the preparation of anybody else’s testimony. As one of two persons at the party who wasn’t “a bit bombed,” Gargan’s memory of the occasion was “clear as a bell.” So it was Gargan’s description of the party that, along with the Senator’s two public versions of the accident, would provide the scenario for inquest testimony. If Gargan testified to the Senator’s attempt to cover up his involvement in the accident as the reason he had failed to report it until the next day, he could blow the entire lid off the case. But that prospect became moot when a writ of certiorari was filed on Tuesday, September 2, asking the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to determine whether “errors of law” had been made in Judge Boyle’s ruling on the conduct of the scheduled inquest in re: Mary Jo Kopechne. Justice Paul Reardon scheduled a hearing for three o’clock. Notified an appeal had been filed,

Nobody wants you to be an artist or a writer, Maggie said. Not only did the world not care if you ever painted a picture or wrote a book, the world kind of wished you wouldn't. Your challenge was to do it anyway.

It was like I had some special strain of Tourette's that made me say exactly the kind of things that would drive him away, even though my biggest fear was that he would leave. Because you know, they always left.

And believing in choice meant you supported it whether someone's choice conformed to your personal beliefs or not.

Before was preparation: leaving home, going to college, launching a career, getting married, having a child, realizing that love might be forever but life was not. After was living with the choices I’d made: that man, that child, that profession, that city, that self.

But I still envisioned thirty—in my own life, in my friends’ lives, in life in general—as a kind of train station. At that station, you got off the train you’d been riding up to that time, the train that had your parents on it, your siblings and your school friends, your textbooks and your pink diary with the lock and key—everything that had been trailing behind you for your entire life. And you got ready to board a different train, a train that would take you the rest of the way.

there is a rock bottom that you can hit, even if you are young and beautiful and smart and loved.

If the means to a well-lived life is to take the road less traveled, first you have to get on the road.

There’s no such thing as telling someone a secret: It stops being a secret the minute it’s told.

Dear Reader, that a sense of privacy is the best gift I ever gave myself.

By thirty, I believe we should all focus more on feeling gratitude for the gifts we’ve been given. The more grateful we feel for our families, for our friends, for the good health we have, the more we will nourish those things for the future.

But by the time we’re in our thirties, I believe we should strive to own and respect who we are, regardless of our struggles and difficulties. After all, even every little and big mistake, like every scar, can be a lesson in humility—one of the greatest gifts of all.

The ability to accept and adapt gracefully to life’s twists and turns is one of the greatest skills you’ll learn. Should you plan for the things you want? Absolutely. But if you’re not exactly where you wanted to be, exactly when you wanted to be there, don’t sweat it.

Love, of course, is a wonderful thing, a grand adventure of the heart. But while it’s thrilling to get caught up in its wake, don’t forget to hold on to who you are—or that incredible person might get swept away.

I think a very key thing for women is to refuse to let anyone tell you you’re banned, you’re out of fashion, you don’t look the right way. Put your energy into a career that will be there for you regardless of the naysayers.

Every kiss has its own meaning. As the early-twentieth-century French chanteuse Mistinguett said: “A kiss can be a comma, a question mark, or an exclamation point. That’s basic spelling that every woman ought to know.

The day you turn thirty is a big deal; it’s when you’re really starting to come into your own. If you were a rose, you would be just starting to open up and show all your layers of petals.

I had grown up with very little parental input, so I learned to be über-responsible, self-reliant, and self-sufficient. As a result, I never wanted to seem

I had grown up with very little parental input, so I learned to be über-responsible, self-reliant, and self-sufficient. As a result, I never wanted to seem like I needed help or to impose on anyone else.

If you’re successful, you’ll have friends who are with you for the moment. They are there because you can afford to be in the room and because you’re the big deal of the moment. And when you’re not the big deal of the moment, you’ll look around the room and see the only people who truly care about and support you. These are the important people to remember.

What would you attempt to do if you knew you couldn’t fail?” When I got that, I thought, Of course, I would just go for it! And that’s what you’ve got to do every single day of your thirties and beyond. Just go for it! Your life is now.

Why do they say life begins at thirty? Some of the most accomplished women of our time have shared their theories already in this book. We have one, too. Thirty is when you stop the comparathon: the rat race that has you constantly looking over your shoulder to see how everyone else is doing at work/love/fitting into their skinny jeans. It’s tempting, after all, to see your twenties as your chance to make your mark. So you do your best, and you keep one eye on everyone else doing theirs. It can all leave a girl frantically busy. Yeah,

as Glamour editor Emma Rosenblum, who recently turned thirty, says: “We’re all on different time lines and need to realize that life isn’t a race. It’s more like one of those huge celebrity walkathons, where everyone’s ambling along at her own pace, wearing a really dorky hat and lots of sunblock.” By thirty, you should be moving at your own speed.

every woman needs to stop sometimes at the great railway station of life—on the evening of her big birthday, or the end of a big love affair, or even an ordinary afternoon—and take stock of where she is, how she got there, where she’s going, and why. That’s what you’re doing right this very minute. You’ve already started. And you’re already there.

When your crow’s-feet begin to creep over your cheekbones, you are too old to be out after midnight more than twice a week. Also: If you love one man, don’t flirt and drink with another. It’s not rocket science,

young women around the age of thirty who are concerned with things like finding a husband, starting a family, paying their bills, and succeeding in their careers, as well as with how they look. I think the most important thing for them to know is that it’s really normal to be freaked out about where you are in life, but those things you want so badly will come in due time. Meanwhile, life will be a lot more joyful if you learn how to be comfortable

young women around the age of thirty who are concerned with things like finding a husband, starting a family, paying their bills, and succeeding in their careers, as well as with how they look. I think the most important thing for them to know is that it’s really normal to be freaked out about where you are in life, but those things you want so badly will come in due time. Meanwhile, life will be a lot more joyful if you learn how to be comfortable in your own skin.

Follow your heart? Forgive me, but that’s the myth of all myths. You should research the man you’re with as thoroughly as you’d research which car to buy. What do other people say about him? What’s his track record? Be aware of what your situation with

Why do we apologize when “sorry” is the last thing we feel? You could argue that as women, it’s been drilled into our heads to be sweet, accommodating, and nurturing. But sometimes, “sorry” is a cop-out: It’s easier than saying what we think. But there are times when it’s important to admit that we’re annoyed, angry, or maybe just plain fed up. So next time you’re about to request forgiveness, ask yourself: “Did I hurt this person’s feelings? Inconvenience her? Wrong him in any way?” If the answer is yes, by all means, genuflect away! But if the answer is no, pause and try one of these kind alternatives instead:

At 30,000 feet up The mind has plenty of space to wander:

A middleage friend of the poet's mother said: "They're killing off all our good men: I tell ya, a black man Today speaks his piece at the risk of losing his life.