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The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears.

Ellen Goodman

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Ellen Goodman
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 11
Journalist
Newton
Massachusetts
Central
Fears
Struggle
Inspirational
Children
Outweigh
Adoption
Parenthood
Hopes

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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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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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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.
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The things we hate about ourselves aren't more real than things we like about ourselves.
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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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This packrat has learned that what the next generation will value most is not what we owned, but the evidence of who we were and the tales of how we loved. In the end, it's the family stories that are worth the storage.
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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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Ultimately, time is all you have and the idea isn't to save it, but to savour it.
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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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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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You can teach someone who cares to write columns, but you can’t teach someone who writes columns to care.
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In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right.
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Welfare is ... the victim of national compassion fatigue.
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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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It has begun to occur to me that life is a stage I'm going through.
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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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Taboos are falling across our culture like dominoes. What was unspeakable yesterday dominates talk shows today.
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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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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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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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