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

Ellen Goodman

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Ellen Goodman
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 11
Journalist
Newton
Massachusetts
Ought
Walks
Inspiration
Maybe
Flaws
Year
Potential
Looking
Inspiring
Lives
Walk
Years
Rooms

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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.
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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.
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People have been writing premature obituaries on the women's movement since its beginning.
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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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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.
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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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Ultimately, time is all you have and the idea isn't to save it, but to savour it.
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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?
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It has begun to occur to me that life is a stage I'm going through.
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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.
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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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She goes in with a prejudice and comes out with a statistic.
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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.
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In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right.
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The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears.
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In today's amphetamine world of news junkies, speed trumps thoughtfulness too often.
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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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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?
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Taboos are falling across our culture like dominoes. What was unspeakable yesterday dominates talk shows today.
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I think most of us become self-critical as soon as we become self-conscious.
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