Ellen Goodman Quotes

62 Sourced Quotes

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?

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

Ellen Goodman
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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Ellen Goodman
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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Ellen Goodman
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.

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

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.

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

Ellen Goodman
How do you make a life? Put one foot in front of the other. Make some choices. Take some chances.

Ellen Goodman
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.

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.

Ellen Goodman
Our mistakes become crucial parts, sometimes the best parts, of the lives we have made.

Ellen Goodman
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.

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

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

Ellen 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
The last boat to the middle class was leaving and we'd better get on it.

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.

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.

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

Ellen Goodman