Perhaps middle-age is, or ...

Perhaps middle-age is, or should be, a period of shedding shells; the shell of ambition, the shell of material accumulations and possessions, the shell of the ego.
Perhaps middle-age is, or should be, a period of shedding shells; the shell of ambition, the shell of material accumulations and possessions, the shell of the ego.
 Anne Morrow Lindbergh

More phrases

Effort only fully releases its reward after a person refuses to quit.
Never complain and never explain.
A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.
 George S. Patton
Problems are not stop signs, they are guidelines.
 Robert Schuller
Never give up, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.
 Harriet Beecher Stowe

Quotes from the same author

By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.
 Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Fame is a kind of death because it arrests life around the person in the public eye. If one is recognized everywhere, one begins to feel like Medusa. People stop their normal life and actions and freeze into staring manikins. "We can never catch people or life unawares," as I wrote to my mother, in an outburst of frustration. "It is always looking at us.
 Anne Morrow Lindbergh
In the sheltered simplicity of the first days after a baby is born, one sees again the magical closed circle, the miraculous sense of two people existing only for each other.
 Anne Morrow Lindbergh
For relationships, too, must be like islands. One must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits - islands surrounded and interrupted by the sea, continuously visited and abandoned by the tides. One must accept the serenity of the winged life, of ebb and flow, of intermittency.
 Anne Morrow Lindbergh
I should like to be a full-time Mother and a full-time Artist and a full-time Wife-Companion and also a 'Charming Woman' on the side! And to be aware and record it all. I cannot do it all. Something must go - several things probably. The 'charming woman' first!
 Anne Morrow Lindbergh