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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.
Ellen Goodman
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Ellen Goodman
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 11
Journalist
Newton
Massachusetts
People
Machine
Began
Mechanical
Relationships
Reduced
Machines
Factor
Later
Plain
Involved
Sooner
Upon
Systems
Time
Factors
More quotes by Ellen Goodman
Taboos are falling across our culture like dominoes. What was unspeakable yesterday dominates talk shows today.
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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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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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Maybe at 20 you can write well, but I don't think you could do what I do. Some things have to happen to you first.
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The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears.
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We may never know why Joe Ellis fabricated a heroic past. But we know that the life he embellished has deeply diminished the life he'd earned.
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Parents remain our touchstones, fellow travelers, even after death. They are both missing and present.
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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 worshipped there for some time.
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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.
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I think most of us become self-critical as soon as we become self-conscious.
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Saving time, it seems, has a primacy that's too rarely examined.
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Statistically speaking, the Cheerful Early Riser is rejected more completely than a member of any other subculture, save those with boot odor.
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[E]very time you think the entertainment moguls have hit rock bottom, they reach for the jackhammer and rat-a-tat-tat a little deeper.
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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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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.
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When you live alone, you can be sure that the person who squeezed the toothpaste tube in the middle wasn't committing a hostile act.
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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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