Ellen Goodman Quotes

Without even knowing it, we are assaulted by a high note of urgency all the time. We end up pacing ourselves to the city rhythm whether or not it's our own. In time we even grow hard of hearing to the rest of the world. Like a violinist stuck next to the timpani, we may lose the ability to hear our own instrument.

What he labels sexual, she labels harassment.

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

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

Who's counting? It was, of course, the minority who were counting. It always is. Most of the women I know today would dearly like to use their fingers and toes for some activity more enthralling than counting. They have been counting for so long. But the peculiar problem of the new math is that every time we stop adding, somebody starts subtracting. At the very least (the advanced students will understand this) the rate of increase slows ... The minority members of any group or profession have two answers: They can keep score or they can lose.

We spend January 1st walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives ... not looking for flaws, but for potential.

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

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

Women have gained access to the institutions, but not enough power to overhaul them.

I have never been especially impressed by the heroics of people convinced they are about to change the world. I am more awed by those who struggle to make one small difference.

Hat the next generation will value most is not what we owned, but the evidence of who we were and the tales of how we lived. In the end, it's the family stories that are worth the storage.

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

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

We want our children to fit in and to stand out. We rarely address the conflict between these goals.

The truth is that we can overhaul our surroundings, renovate our environment, talk a new game, join a new club, far more easily than we can change the way we respond emotionally. It is easier to change behavior than feelings about that behavior.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When I was at 'Newsweek' magazine - which, you know, this really sounds like I walked four miles in the snow to school - but I started at 'Newsweek' magazine in 1963, which was before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. So it was actually legal to discriminate against women, and 'Newsweek' did.

We each have a litany of holiday rituals and everyday habits that we hold on to, and we often greet radical innovation with the enthusiasm of a baby meeting a new sitter. We defend against it and - not always, but often enough - reject it. Slowly we adjust, but only if we have to.

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.

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.

Today, much of journalism and politics are in a kind of collusion to oversimplify and personalize issues. No room for ambivalence. Plenty of room for the personal attack.

We continually want to unmask our heroes as if there were more to be learned from their nakedness than from their choice of clothing.

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?

Traditions are the guideposts driven deep in our subconscious minds. The most powerful ones are those we can't even describe, aren't even aware of.

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.

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

The women's movement was always going to work in two parts. With one part, we'd break open the doors that were closed to women, and with the other part, we'd walk through, transforming society for men and women. Turns out it was a lot easier to open the doors.

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?

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.

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.

When we describe what the other person is really like, I suppose we often picture what we want. We look through the prism of our need.

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."

When speech is divorced from speaker and word from meaning, what is left is just ritual, language as ritual.

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

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.

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?

Today Washington is our Hollywood, the Senate our Warner Bros., the White House our Beverly Hills. People who never read a line of a movie magazine deal with the lives of leaders as if they were Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

Women who once aspired to the image of superwoman now worry about becoming superdrudge. Those who wanted to have it all now ask whether they have to do it all.

There's a trick to the 'graceful exit.' It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, or a relationship is over - and let it go. It means leaving what's over without denying its validity or its past importance to our lives. It involves a sense of future, a belief that every exit line is an entry, that we are moving up, rather than out.

You can teach someone who cares to write columns, but you can't teach someone who writes columns to care.

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.

Ultimately, time is all you have and the idea isn't to save it, but to savour it.

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

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

We criticize mothers for closeness. We criticize fathers for distance. How many of us have expected less from our fathers and appreciated what they gave us more? How many of us always let them off the hook?

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.

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

We may never know why Joe Ellis fabricated a heroic past. But we know that the life he embellished has deeply diminished the life he'd earned.

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

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.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

When you live alone, you can be sure that the person who squeezed the toothpaste tube in the middle wasn't committing a hostile act.

What do I want to take home from my summer vacation? Time. The wonderful luxury of being at rest. The days when you shut down the mental machinery that keeps life on track and let life simply wander. The days when you stop planning, analyzing, thinking and just are. Summer is my period of grace.

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.

We have become a nation of Kodachrome, Nikon, Instamatic addicts. But we haven't yet developed a clear idea of the ethics of picture-taking ... Where do we get the right to bring other people home in a canister? Where did we lose the right to control our image?

It's self-deceptive to think we're in a post-feminist world when we never tried a feminist world.

I rewrite a great deal. I'm always fiddling, always changing something. I'll write a few words - then I'll change them. I add. I subtract. I work and fiddle and keep working and fiddling, and I only stop at the deadline.

Values are not trendy items that are casually traded in.

Kerry asks Americans to look at the evidence. Bush asks people to believe.

It is not that fathers are better or worse, not that they are more loved or criticized, but rather that they are viewed with far less intensity. There is no Philip Roth or Woody Allen or Nancy Friday who writes about fathers with a runaway excess of humor, horror ... feeling. Most of us let our fathers off the hook.

We owned what we learned back there; the experience and the growth are grafted into our lives.

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