Best 81 quotes of Ellen Goodman on MyQuotes

Ellen Goodman

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    Ellen Goodman

    Age is an accumulation of life and loss. Adulthood is a series of lines crossed.

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    Ellen Goodman

    All in all, I am not surprised that the people who want to unravel the social contract start with young adults. Those who are urged to feel afraid, very afraid, have both the greatest sense of independence and the most finely honed skepticism about government.

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    Ellen Goodman

    Alternative Lifestyles, the emotional fly-drive packages of our times, come equipped with a set of clothes, a choice of authors, a limited menu of sports and a discount coupon book of clichés.

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    Ellen Goodman

    Civility, it is said, means obeying the unenforceable.

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    Ellen Goodman

    Even if every program were educational and every advertisement bore the seal of approval of the American Dental Association, we would still have a critical problem. It's not just the programs but the act of watching television hour after hour after hour that's destructive.

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    Ellen Goodman

    Everyone who deals with teens seems to agree that the most important and toughest job is staying in connection and conversation ... not delivering a lecture but saying what we think.

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    Ellen Goodman

    Every thing, even the so-called timesaving device and energy-efficient machine, comes these days with an elaborate set of instructions for its care and feeding. Buying a machine has become more and more like buying a pet. ... We are time-crunched. Not just by the number of things we have to do, but the number of things we have. In the late twentieth century, things have become our new dependents.

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    Ellen Goodman

    [E]very time you think the entertainment moguls have hit rock bottom, they reach for the jackhammer and rat-a-tat-tat a little deeper.

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    Ellen Goodman

    Forty is ... an age at which people have histories and options. At thirty, they had perhaps less history. At fifty, perhaps fewer options.

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    Ellen Goodman

    How come pleasure never makes it on to... a dutiful list of do's and don'ts? Doesn't joy also get soft and flabby if you neglect to exercise it?

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    Ellen Goodman

    How many of the people I know - sons and daughters - have intricate abstract expressionist paintings of their mothers, created out of their own emotions, attitudes, hands. And how many have only Polaroid pictures of their fathers.

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    Ellen Goodman

    I am a political recidivist. An incorrigible, repeat voter. A career lever-pusher. My electoral rap sheet is as long as your arm. Over the course of three decades, I have voted for presidents and school board members. I have voted in high hopes and high dudgeon. I have voted in favor of candidates and merely against their opponents. I have voted for propositions written with such complexity that I needed Noam Chomsky to deconstruct their meaning. I have been a single-issue voter and a marginal voter. I have even voted for people who ran unopposed. Hold an election and I'll be there.

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    Ellen Goodman

    I don't know exactly why the notion of homeownership has such a grasp on the American imagination. Perhaps as descendants of landless immigrants we turn our plots into symbols of stability.

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    Ellen Goodman

    If there's a single message passed down from each generation of American parents to their children, it is a two-word line: Better Yourself. And if there's a temple of self-betterment in each town, it is the local school. We have worshipped there for some time.

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    Ellen Goodman

    In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right.

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    Ellen Goodman

    instant opinion is an oxymoron. You don't get real opinions in an instant. You get reactions.

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    Ellen Goodman

    In the biotech revolution, it is the human body, not iron or steel or plastic, that's at the source. Are the biocapitalists going to be allowed to dig without consent into our genetic codes, then market them?

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    Ellen Goodman

    In today's amphetamine world of news junkies, speed trumps thoughtfulness too often.

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    Ellen Goodman

    I regard this novel as a work without redeeming social value, unless it can be recycled as a cardboard box.

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    Ellen Goodman

    I suppose we make kids the repository of our highest ideals because children are powerless. In that way we can have ideals and ignore them at the same time.

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    Ellen Goodman

    It has begun to occur to me that life is a stage I'm going through.

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    Ellen Goodman

    I think most of us become self-critical as soon as we become self-conscious.

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    Ellen Goodman

    It is, I suppose, the business of grandparents to create memories and the relative of memories: traditions. We want to lodge moments, like snapshots, in the fleeting video of time.

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    Ellen Goodman

    I vote because it's what small-d democracy is about. Because there are places where people fight for generations and stand for hours to cast a ballot knowing what we ought to remember: that it makes a difference. Not always a big difference. Not always an immediate difference. But a difference.

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    Ellen Goodman

    I wonder whether our adoption of Shrink-ese as a second language, the move from religious phrases of judgment to secular words of acceptance, hasn't also produced a moral lobotomy. In the reluctance, the aversion to being judgmental, are we disabled from making any judgments at all?

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    Ellen Goodman

    I would like to say we're at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.

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    Ellen Goodman

    Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers.

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    Ellen Goodman

    Maybe this year, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives not looking for flaws, but looking for potential.

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    Ellen Goodman

    Most people do not consider dawn to be an attractive experience - unless they are still up.

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    Ellen Goodman

    My father used to say that if a man fools you once, he's a jerk. If he fools you twice, you're a jerk. Only he didn't use the word "jerk.

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    Ellen Goodman

    My generation is the first in my species to have put fitness next to godliness on the scale of things. Keeping in shape has become the imperative of our middle age. The heaviest burden of guilt we carry into our forties is flab. Our sense of failure is measured by the grade on a stress test.

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    Ellen Goodman

    Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to a job that you need so you can pay for the clothes, car and the house that you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it.

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    Ellen Goodman

    Once upon a time we were just plain people. But that was before we began having relationships with mechanical systems. Get involved with a machine and sooner or later you are reduced to a factor.

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    Ellen Goodman

    On television, journalists now routinely appear on talk-shows-with-an-attitude where they are encouraged to say what they think about something they may not have finished thinking about.

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    Ellen Goodman

    Our 'mistakes' become our crucial parts, sometimes our best parts, of the lives we have made.

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    Ellen Goodman

    Parents remain our touchstones, fellow travelers, even after death. They are both missing and present.

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    Ellen Goodman

    People have been writing premature obituaries on the women's movement since its beginning.

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    Ellen Goodman

    Pro-choice supporters are often heard using the cool language of the courts and the vocabulary of rights. Americans who are deeply ambivalent about abortion often miss the sound of caring.

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    Ellen Goodman

    Saving time, it seems, has a primacy that's too rarely examined.

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    Ellen Goodman

    She goes in with a prejudice and comes out with a statistic.

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    Ellen Goodman

    Statistically speaking, the Cheerful Early Riser is rejected more completely than a member of any other subculture, save those with boot odor.

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    Ellen Goodman

    Taboos are falling across our culture like dominoes. What was unspeakable yesterday dominates talk shows today.

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    Ellen Goodman

    The average parent may, for example, plant an artist or fertilize a ballet dancer and end up with a certified public accountant. We cannot train children along chicken wire to make them grow in the right direction. Tying them to stakes is frowned upon, even in Massachusetts.

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    Ellen Goodman

    The central paradox of motherhood is that while our children become the absolute center of our lives, they must also push us backout in the world.... But motherhood that can narrow our lives can also broaden them. It can make us focus intensely on the moment and invest heavily in the future.

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    Ellen Goodman

    The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears.

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    Ellen Goodman

    The great myth of our work-intense era is 'quality time.' We believe we can make up for the loss of days or hours, especially with each other, by concentrated minutes. But ultimately there is no way to do one-minute mothering. There is no way to pay attention in a hurry.

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    Ellen Goodman

    There is so much more information about the scientific world than there was a generation ago that we have all increased our opportunities for ignorance. There are more things not to know. ... The machinery that we deal with is so much more complex that it is possible to become dysfunctional at a much higher level of performance.

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    Ellen Goodman

    There's a trick to the Graceful Exit. It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, a relationship is over - and to let go. It means leaving what's over without denying its validity or its past importance in our lives.

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    Ellen Goodman

    The same people who tell us that smoking doesn't cause cancer are now telling us that advertising cigarettes doesn't cause smoking.

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    Ellen Goodman

    The things we hate about ourselves aren't more real than things we like about ourselves.