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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
Someone
Care
Writing
Columns
Writes
Cares
Teach
Write

More quotes by 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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Saving time, it seems, has a primacy that's too rarely examined.
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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instant opinion is an oxymoron. You don't get real opinions in an instant. You get reactions.
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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What he labels sexual, she labels harassment.
Ellen Goodman
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Kerry asks Americans to look at the evidence. Bush asks people to believe.
Ellen Goodman
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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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Welfare is ... the victim of national compassion fatigue.
Ellen Goodman
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We criticize mothers for closeness. We criticize fathers for distance. How many of us have expected less from our fathers and appreciated what they gave us more? How many of us always let them off the hook?
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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She goes in with a prejudice and comes out with a statistic.
Ellen Goodman
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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.
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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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.
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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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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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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It has begun to occur to me that life is a stage I'm going through.
Ellen Goodman