Ellen Goodman Quotes

62 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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
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
It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, a relationship, is over — and let it go. It involves a sense of the future, a belief that every exit line is an entry, that we are moving on, rather than out.

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.

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 worshiped there for some time.

Ellen Goodman
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.

Ellen Goodman
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.

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

Ellen Goodman
He was the sort of man who looked like he was wearing a tie even in a sports shirt. He could be rigid in a hammock.

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.

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

Ellen Goodman
Adolescence isn't a training ground for adulthood now; it is a holding pattern for aging youth.

Ellen 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
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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Ellen Goodman