Ellen Goodman Quotes

62 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

Ellen Goodman
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.

Ellen Goodman
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.

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

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

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

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 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
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