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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 validity or its past importance in our lives.

Ellen Goodman

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Ellen Goodman
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 11
Journalist
Newton
Massachusetts
Lives
Begins
Means
Recognize
Jobs
Leaving
Graceful
Past
Importance
Validity
Without
Relationship
Denying
Mean
Stage
Exit
Life
Vision
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Tricks

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You can teach someone who cares to write columns, but you can’t teach someone who writes columns to care.
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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.
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She goes in with a prejudice and comes out with a statistic.
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It has begun to occur to me that life is a stage I'm going through.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Ultimately, time is all you have and the idea isn't to save it, but to savour it.
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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.
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instant opinion is an oxymoron. You don't get real opinions in an instant. You get reactions.
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In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right.
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Forty is ... an age at which people have histories and options. At thirty, they had perhaps less history. At fifty, perhaps fewer options.
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People have been writing premature obituaries on the women's movement since its beginning.
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I regard this novel as a work without redeeming social value, unless it can be recycled as a cardboard box.
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You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.
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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.
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Parents remain our touchstones, fellow travelers, even after death. They are both missing and present.
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I think most of us become self-critical as soon as we become self-conscious.
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