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Ultimately, time is all you have and the idea isn't to save it, but to savour it.

Ellen Goodman

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Ellen Goodman
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 11
Journalist
Newton
Massachusetts
Mindfulness
Ultimately
Save
Idea
Ideas
Time
Savour

More quotes by Ellen Goodman

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Parents remain our touchstones, fellow travelers, even after death. They are both missing and present.
Ellen Goodman
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we have made an extraordinary transition. From moral absolutes to moral relativism. ... Moral problems become medical ones and yesterday's sinners become today's patients.
Ellen Goodman
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She goes in with a prejudice and comes out with a statistic.
Ellen Goodman
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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.
Ellen Goodman
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Welfare is ... the victim of national compassion fatigue.
Ellen Goodman
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People have been writing premature obituaries on the women's movement since its beginning.
Ellen Goodman
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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.
Ellen Goodman
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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.
Ellen Goodman
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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.
Ellen Goodman
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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.
Ellen Goodman
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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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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?
Ellen Goodman
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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.
Ellen Goodman
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Taboos are falling across our culture like dominoes. What was unspeakable yesterday dominates talk shows today.
Ellen Goodman
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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.
Ellen Goodman
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Saving time, it seems, has a primacy that's too rarely examined.
Ellen Goodman
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What he labels sexual, she labels harassment.
Ellen Goodman
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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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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.
Ellen Goodman
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Women have gained access to the institutions, but not enough power to overhaul them.
Ellen Goodman