Ellen Goodman Quotations

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 value.

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?

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

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.

Values are not trendy items that are casually traded in.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Call me a cockeyed pessimist, but I'm having trouble finding any good news in the trashing of Harriet Miers.

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

I think that having a job in journalism, despite all of the changes, is still a fantastic way to be - make a living observing your society and having a chance to use your voice.

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.

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

Those inevitable dreams where you can't get your column in, you know, and at first they were the Xerox telecopy, and then they were the fax machine, and then they were, you know, email. The anxiety remains the same, but the technology has changed.

Now that we have waved 'Bye, Bye, Brownie' to Michael Brown, the hapless head of FEMA, could we turn our sights back to another agency on the skids: the Food and Drug Administration?

Frankly, people who buy Showtime pay-per-view are supporting him and supporting the notion that you can get away with anything.

I vote because even the lesser of two evils is the lesser of two evils.

some people hate the president so much that it's impossible to have a conversation with them.

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.

How did we end the summer ... stuck between a Roberts and a hard place? We've spent months poring over 60,000 pages from the National Archives and reams of personal profiles for clues about how John Roberts would rule on the highest court in land. ... The bottom line is that barring some last minute photo of John Roberts popping out of a cake at a KKK rally smoking crack, he's going to be confirmed. And if he were magically derailed, who would be next? ... John Roberts may turn out to be as far right as People for the American Way says. But he may also be as good as it gets under this administration.

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.

We are told that people stay in love because of chemistry, or because they remain intrigued with each other, because of many kindnesses, because of luck. But part of it has got to be forgiveness and gratefulness.

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.

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

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

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

Welfare is ... the victim of national compassion fatigue.

If women can sleep their way to the top, how come they aren't there?

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.

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

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

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.

[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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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

Maybe at 20 you can write well, but I don't think you could do what I do. Some things have to happen to you first.

What advertisers call brand loyalty is merely the consumer's defense against the need to waste energy differentiating among things that barely differ.

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.

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.

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

You can believe in women's rights without believing that every woman is right.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Slowly we adjust, but only if we have to.

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.

Civility, it is said, means obeying the unenforceable.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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."

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

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.

I am a member of a small, nearly extinct minority group, a kind of urban lost tribe who insist, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, on the sanctity of being on time. Which is to say that we On-timers are compulsively, unfashionably prompt, that there are only handfuls of us in any given city and, unfortunately, we never seem to have appointments with each other.

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

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

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.

What he labels sexual, she labels harassment.

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

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?

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

we have made an extraordinary transition. From moral absolutes to moral relativism. ... Moral problems become medical ones and yesterday's sinners become today's patients.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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