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You can teach someone who cares to write columns, but you can’t teach someone who writes columns to care.

Ellen Goodman

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Ellen Goodman
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 11
Journalist
Newton
Massachusetts
Cares
Teach
Write
Someone
Care
Writing
Columns
Writes

More quotes by Ellen Goodman

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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.
Ellen Goodman
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The great myth of our work-intense era is 'quality time.' We believe we can make up for the loss of days or hours, especially with each other, by concentrated minutes. But ultimately there is no way to do one-minute mothering. There is no way to pay attention in a hurry.
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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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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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.
Ellen Goodman
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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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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.
Ellen Goodman
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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.
Ellen Goodman
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I think most of us become self-critical as soon as we become self-conscious.
Ellen Goodman
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Welfare is ... the victim of national compassion fatigue.
Ellen Goodman
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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.
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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Women have gained access to the institutions, but not enough power to overhaul them.
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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It has begun to occur to me that life is a stage I'm going through.
Ellen Goodman
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instant opinion is an oxymoron. You don't get real opinions in an instant. You get reactions.
Ellen Goodman
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Civility, it is said, means obeying the unenforceable.
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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She goes in with a prejudice and comes out with a statistic.
Ellen Goodman
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Saving time, it seems, has a primacy that's too rarely examined.
Ellen Goodman