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I regard this novel as a work without redeeming social value, unless it can be recycled as a cardboard box.

Ellen Goodman

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Ellen Goodman
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 11
Journalist
Newton
Massachusetts
Unless
Novel
Cardboard
Values
Recycled
Social
Redeeming
Without
Recycling
Work
Boxes
Regard
Value

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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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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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Parents remain our touchstones, fellow travelers, even after death. They are both missing and present.
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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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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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Ultimately, time is all you have and the idea isn't to save it, but to savour it.
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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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The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears.
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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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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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You can believe in women's rights without believing that every woman is right.
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In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right.
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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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Saving time, it seems, has a primacy that's too rarely examined.
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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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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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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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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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