Goodman Quotes

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. ~ Ellen Goodman

A free American girl can accommodate herself to circumstances without the aid of a man. -Nellie Bly ~ Matthew Goodman

She hesitated. "I'm not sure I understand."
"Don't you?" he asked. "You changed my heart, Rachel."
She felt her throat constrict, making any reply impossible.
"Rachel?" Her silence rarely made him uncomfortable, but this time he had no clear view of her features and no way to gauge her reaction. He wondered if he should have made a more straightforward declaration. "Did you hear me say I love you?"
She turned her cheek into his shoulder. "I heard you. ~ Jo Goodman

She herself vacillated when it came to belief. She did not particularly believe in God. Or, rather, she didn't believe in a particular God. Nevertheless, she kept an open mind. She was not a melancholy agnostic, but the optimistic kind. She liked to give God the benefit of the doubt. ~ Allegra Goodman

A typical Ponzi scheme involves taking money from investors, then paying them off with money taken from new investors, rather than paying them from actual earnings. ~ Amy Goodman

Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, "This ... this ... "; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos. ~ Paul Goodman

Thwarted, or starved, in the important objects proper to young capacities, the boys and young men naturally find or invent deviant objects for themselves ... Their choices and inventions are rarely charming, usually stupid, and often disastrous; we cannot expect average kids to deviate with genius. But on the other hand, the young men who conform to the dominant society become for the most part apathetic, disappointed, cynical and wasted. ~ Paul Goodman

If you control the code, you control the world. This is the future that awaits us. ~ Marc 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. ~ Ellen Goodman

That also means the antivirus software you are running on your own computer is likely only catching 5 percent of the emerging threats targeting your machine. If your body's own immune system had a batting average like that, you would be dead in a matter of hours. ~ Marc Goodman

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

sealing the pores were undertaken, famously with a horse. The poor animal was carefully varnished all over with several layers of shellac (the same solution that is used to varnish furniture) to ensure a complete seal, and died within hours. It was assumed that it had asphyxiated, thus 'proving' that the skin played an important role in respiration as well as perspiration. ~ Ruth Goodman

But the last time the Cubs won a National League pennant
Was the year we dropped the bomb on Japan ~ Steve Goodman

Going to where the silence is. That is the responsibility of a journalist: giving a voice to those who have been forgotten, forsaken, and beaten down by the powerful. ~ Amy Goodman

Once he left the Haywood out for her with a page number on a scrap of paper, and she opened the book to recipes for "Distillation." Jess laughed at the page George had found for her. There, between instructions to make rose water and clove water, were instructions "to make jessamine water: Take eight ounces of the jessamine flowers, clean picked from their stalks, three quarts of spirit of wine, and two quarts of water: put the whole into an alembic, and draw off three quarts. Then take a pound of sugar dissolved in two quarts of water, and mix it with the distilled liquor." George left no comment on the recipe, but she read, and read it over, aware that he was thinking of her. ~ Allegra Goodman

As far as I know, the guys at Pixar are opposed to a Monsters, Inc. sequel. ~ John Goodman

The ideal of having a real job that you risk your soul in and make good or be damned, belongs to the heroic age of capitalist enterprise, imbued with self-righteous beliefs about hard work, thrift, and public morals. Such an ideal might still have been mentioned in public fifty years ago; in our era of risk-insured semimonopolies and advertised vices it would be met with a ghastly stillness. ~ Paul Goodman

[Luke, holding stormtrooper helmet.] Alas, poor stormtrooper, I knew ye not,/ yet have I taken both uniform and life/ From thee. What manner of a man wert thou?/ A man of inf'nite jest or cruelty?/ A man with helpmate and with children too?/ A man who hath his Empire serv'd with pride?/ A man, perhaps, who wish'd for perfect peace?/ What'er thou wert, goodman, thy pardon grant/ Unto the one who took thy place: e'en me. ~ Ian Doescher

I know that love is about power, too. Who gives, who takes. Who is willing to risk showing their true self. ~ Alison Goodman

You can get a bit 'head in the clouds' - well, I do - and full of myself if I stick in front of the camera for too long. I forget there is hard work that needs to be done. ~ Tom Goodman-Hill

Today, using the distributed computing power of the cloud and tools such as CloudCracker, you can try 300 million variations of your potential password in about twenty minutes at a cost of about $17. This means that anyone could rent Amazon's cloud-computing services to crack the average encryption key protecting most Wi-Fi networks in just under six minutes, all for the paltry sum of $1.68 in rental time (sure to drop in the future thanks to Moore's law). ~ Marc Goodman

In the meantime, it just makes it a little harder to smile. But so does the world. ~ Amy Goodman

We've got an acquisitive gene. We want and want, and there's no way around it. ~ Allegra Goodman

Those very same metadata are contained in millions of photographs posted to sale and auction sites such as Craigslist and eBay. For example, a photograph of a diamond ring or an iPad posted on Craigslist might have embedded with it the precise location of your home where the photograph was taken. ~ Marc Goodman

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. ~ Ellen Goodman

Crema Seamans," Ethan repeated thoughtfully. "It's like a soup made from ... various semens. A medley of semens. It's a flavour of Campbell's soup that got discontinued immediately."
"Stop it, Ethan, you're being totally graphic," said Cathy Kiplinger.
"Well, he is a graphic artist," said Goodman. ~ Meg Wolitzer

People ask every day, "Why was I put on earth?" As if there is perhaps one reason. The truth is that there are too many reasons to count, and each reason and each soul connects to every other, ~ Allegra Goodman

When there is official censorship it is a sign that speech is serious. Where there is none, it is pretty certain that the official spokesmen have all the loud-speakers. ~ Paul Goodman

I was very excited to hone in on John Goodman. Casting John first really set the tone. He's very good at being terrifying and being hilarious, and I loved the idea of that character not being merely 'moustache-twirly'. I enjoyed being scared by him. ~ Dan Trachtenberg

Be patient, do nothing, cease striving. We find this advice disheartening and therefore unfeasible because we forget it is our own inflexible activity that is structuring the reality. We think that if we do not hustle, nothing will happen and we will pine away. But the reality is probably in motion and after a while we might take part in that motion. But one can't know. ~ Paul Goodman

When a village ceases to be a community, it becomes oppressive in its narrow conformity. So one becomes an individual and migrates to the city. There, finding others like-minded, one re-establishes a village community. Nowadays only New Yorkers are yokels. ~ Paul Goodman

People getting their mercury fillings removed report immediate and dramatic changes in focus, attention, memory, concentration. ~ David Goodman

Victory is the thought transformation resulting from comprehending that physical immortality ... perpetual longevity, sans illness and aging ... eternal, healthy, youthful life in your living flesh ... is not a fantasy, but a practical and attainable possibility. ~ Linda Goodman

Jess gazed at the apples arranged in all their colors: russet, blushing pink, freckled gold. She cast her eyes over heaps of pumpkins, bins of tomatoes cut from the vine, pale gooseberries with crumpled leaves. "You could buy a farm."
"Why would I do that?"
"To be healthy," said Jess.
Emily shook her head. "I don't think I'd be a very good farmer."
"You could have other people farm your farm for you," said Jess. "And you could just eat all the good things."
Emily laughed. "That's what we're doing here at the Farmers' Market. We're paying farmers to farm for us. You've just invented agriculture."
"Yes, but you could have your own farm and go out there and breathe the fresh air and touch the fresh earth."
"I think that's called a vacation," said Emily.
"Oh, you're too boring to be rich," Jess said. "And I would be so talented! ~ Allegra Goodman

The family is the American fascism. ~ Paul Goodman

I don't trust myself enough. When I write, I overwrite. Gingerbread. Too much gingerbread. Writing is probably the only hobby I have. But I wish I had another one. If I was just a little better at golf. ~ John Goodman

I can't do most things, if I'm honest, but cooking I definitely can't do. ~ Len Goodman

'Spamalot' was a blip! I've never done anything else like that, and yet it's the only time I've ever been nominated for an Olivier award! ~ Tom Goodman-Hill

I'm a technophobe. I can't crack the iPhone, and the extent of my multitasking is being able to talk while I make a drink. ~ Len Goodman

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. ~ Ellen Goodman

There is only one curriculum, no matter what the method of education: what is basic and universal in human experience and practice, the underlying structure of culture. ~ Paul Goodman

Pardon me for loitering in front of an orchestra. ~ John Goodman

We don't get to choose what truths God reveals to us
but we do get to choose what we do with the truths
whom we share it with and how. ~ Carol Goodman

In his school, Bertrand Russell thought it was better if they had the sex, so they could give their undivided attention to mathematics, which was the main thing. ~ Paul Goodman

In the modern world, we Americans are the old inhabitants. We first had political freedom, high industrial production, an economy of abundance. ~ Paul Goodman

They cooked and washed dishes and scrubbed and mopped and dusted and wiped and cleaned the apartment from crack to crevice back to crack. ~ Matthew Aaron Goodman

Love made room for conflict. It allowed for the expression of more than one view and invited the paradox that disagreement was vital to harmony. Love required accepting and meant changing oneself rather than demanding change of others. ~ Jo Goodman

As in the case of the economy, an 'invisible hand' will often be a better cultivator of ideas and allocator of effort. The challenge for intelligence officials in the Information Age is to understand how to integrate these indirect mechanisms into their operations ~ Allan E. Goodman

Even without the Grand Reclaimer bond, Helen, you are my heartbeat. My pulse. You are the fire in my blood and the laughter in my soul. ~ Alison Goodman

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. ~ Ellen Goodman

If you want to direct, you've got to work. ~ John Goodman

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. ~ Ellen Goodman

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. ~ Ellen Goodman

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

The course of love was never straight. ~ Alison Goodman

In America you can say anything you want - as long as it doesn't have any effect. ~ Paul Goodman

and the goodman beheld this apparition, which had bare feet and a tattered petticoat, running about among the flower-beds distributing life around her. The sound of the watering-pot on the leaves filled Father Mabeuf's soul with ecstasy. It seemed to him that the rhododendron was happy now. ~ Victor Hugo

I'm really getting to appreciate traditional jazz now - the New Orleans stuff - a lot more than I did before. ~ John Goodman

I had never heard anyone play like Benny Goodman and had never seen anyone like him on the stage. I realize now that what impressed me and stayed with me in memory was - the sounds he made. He played so purely. The music seemed to come from him, not just the instrument he played with such mastery. ~ Marian Seldes

I get so annoyed at people not looking after their parents. The deal is when we are growing up they look after us and as they grow older we look after them. That's the deal. ~ Len Goodman

John Goodman's pretty dark - I love John Goodman. ~ Todd Phillips

Penology ... has become torture and foolishness, a waste of money and a cause of crime ... a blotting out of sight and heightening of social anxiety. ~ Paul Goodman

Jeanne's sisters thought nothing of themselves ... Helen stayed up late in Brookline, baking. Lemon squares, and brownies, pecan bars, apple cake, sandy almond cookies. Alone in her kitchen, she wrapped these offerings in waxed paper and froze them in tight-lipped containers ...
Helen was the baker of the family. What she felt could not be purchased. She grieved from scratch. ~ Allegra Goodman

The power of laughter & love would beat out the power of fear every time. ~ John Goodman

As ever in the family Goodman, someone would have to swallow feelings here, and it was easier that it be Mercer. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

And what mattered most was not that I needed to see and hear that I was beautiful. No, what mattered most was that I was in love with a young woman whose love for me introduced me to the vastness of the universe, the infinite and the finite, from Timbuktu to me, the young Ever Park brother who played basketball and wrote secret letters, and who sometimes just happened to, you know, stumble in and find Kaya in the library after school. ~ Matthew Aaron Goodman

Any effort ... to make the obscure obvious is likely to be unappealing, for the penalty of failure is confusion while the reward of success is banality. ~ Nelson Goodman

He recognizes the necessity of life-saving medical procedures, but embodies the belief that one of the first responsibilities of the medical community is to help patients establish lifestyles that give them an opportunity to avoid needing those procedures. One important way to do that is to truly examine our diets, physical activity, and stress levels. At ~ Dennis Goodman

Why live unless you live large? Death is a reality, always present, waiting, with that in mind, live today, it is everything you own. ~ Jason 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. ~ Ellen Goodman

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? ~ Ellen Goodman

The organization of American society is an interlocking system of semi-monopolies notoriously venal, an electorate notoriously unenlightened, misled by mass media notoriously phony. ~ Paul Goodman

The thing with children is they're a bit like baking a fruitcake: you throw all the ingredients in but you never know how they're going to turn out. ~ Len Goodman

did you realize every time you speak a query into Apple's Siri artificial intelligence agent, your voice recording is analyzed and stored by the company for at least two years? ~ Marc Goodman

Smokey, this is not 'Nam. This is bowling. There are rules. ~ John Goodman

The roses bloomed, thousands of them in a floral amphitheater, blossoms shading from gold and coral at the top of the garden to scarlet and deep pink on tiers below. At the bottom, in the center of the rosy congregation, the palest apricots and ivories perfumed the air. ~ Allegra Goodman

Even a cornered rabbit will fight with teeth and claws. ~ Alison Goodman

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

The "brightness" of the 15 percent might or might not indicate a profound feeling for the causes of things; it is largely verbal and symbol-manipulating, and is almost certainly partly an obsessional device not to know and touch risky matter, just as Freud long ago pointed out that the nagging questions of small children are a substitute for asking the forbidden questions. ~ Paul Goodman

I went to Bergdorf Goodman as an assistant in the fashion office and that was really my first exposure into the world of retail. Dawn Mello was president at the time and she had just left Gucci where she found Tom Ford. ~ Roopal Patel

My my Laura Goodman. I must say that is a charming name for a charming young lady."
"Eric's old." I broke in. "Really really old."
"Er - really?" Laura asked. "Gosh you don't look even out of your thirties."
"Tons of face-lifts. He's a surgical addict. I'm trying to get him help." I added defensively when they both gave me strange looks. ~ MaryJanice Davidson

In a milieu of resignation, where the young men think of society as a closed room in which there are no values but the rejected rat race, ... it is extremely hard to aim at objective truth or world culture. One's own products are likely to be personal or parochial. ~ Paul Goodman

In the upstate farmhouse he had dubbed Mount Zion, Matthias had apparently established for himself a community of seven wives - a "harem," Locke called it - six of them wealthy white women and the seventh a black servant by the name of Isabella Van Wagenen, and "had one appointed to each working day in the week, and the black one consecrated for Sundays." (Isabella Van Wagenen was a former slave who would later join the abolitionist movement, changing her name to the one by which she would be forever remembered: Sojourner Truth.) ~ Matthew Goodman

It feels good to hear these words, even if I haven't done anything and we're not even close to being men. Even if we are screwups, losers, and criminals, it's still nice to hear someone like Mr. E tell us different. ~ Shawn Goodman

The trouble when you die is that everyone says you were nice. I would like to be thought of as genuinely nice. I would like there to be people who can honestly say, 'Len! Oh yeah, there was more good than bad in him.' ~ Len Goodman

If we are ready to tolerate everything as understood, there is nothing left to explain; while if we sourly refuse to take anything, even tentatively, as clear, no explanation can be given. ~ Nelson Goodman

Like, every couple of months you read, they rewrite, you come back in, they've animated more stuff - they usually videotape you while you're reading it - so they'll incorporate some gestures and some facial expressions into it. ~ John Goodman

It was cool for a couple of weeks, but how much bad golf can you play? ~ John Goodman

Little Red Riding Hood got what she deserved. You don't go walking in the woods alone if you want to avoid wolves."
I was about to say something in response, but Nicky Ballard did it for me. "You could say that about the wolf, too. If you go around attacking defenseless girls, you can expect payback. ~ Carol Goodman

Or perhaps one's foes always seemed smaller once they had been defeated. ~ Alison Goodman

As soon as it was understood that we could handle things in our own way, it was the thrill of my life to walk out on that stage with people just hemming the band in. ~ Benny Goodman

An obstacle is something you see when you take your eyes off the goal Few great men could pass personnel ~ Paul Goodman

You have to speak your mind, but without being cruel. ~ Len Goodman

On breezy days when the wind was not too light and not too strong, Will and Pamela and the children flew their homemade kites in Peaceful Park until they were specks in the blue sky. When the wind was just right, the kites felt so strong and safe up there that Honor imagined nothing could budge them.
'Ho bum, boasted Will, 'I could stand here all day and this kite would hold. It's like fishing.'
'Fishing in reverse,' said Pamela. 'Sky fishing.'
'What do you fish for in the air?' asked Honor.
Pamela and Will started laughing. 'Oh, planets,' said Will. 'The occasional comet. An asteroid or two.'
Honor held one kite string, and Will held the other. Pamela held Quintilian. On those afternoons, four did not seem like the wrong number for a family. Four seemed just right. ~ Allegra Goodman

I always tell the adults at my dance school, 'Men, you are going to have to do something that you are absolutely not used to: you have got to take command and be the boss.' Because - and this is just an observation - women get their way. ~ Len Goodman

There they were sitting at the bar, these two Luscious babes, and they were Siamese twins. ~ Steve Goodman

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. ~ Ellen Goodman

Where have you been, Theodora?," Mrs Goodman asked.
"Walking, Mother."
"And whom did you see?"
Mrs Goodman flung her grammar like a stone.
"I did not see a cat," said Theodora.
Mrs Goodman looked at her daughter, who giggled before she left the room. ~ Patrick White

Lord Carlston was not a man to be contained, even in adjectives. ~ Alison Goodman

Fifty-five percent of people use the same password across most Web sites, and 40 percent don't even bother to use one at all on their smart phones. ~ Marc Goodman