Quote

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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Ellen Goodman
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 11
Journalist
Newton
Massachusetts
Write
Deadline
Keep
Add
Change
Changing
Great
Deal
Writing
Deals
Fiddling
Work
Stop
Subtract
Something
Working
Fiddle
Always
Words
Rewrite

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Kerry asks Americans to look at the evidence. Bush asks people to believe.
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The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears.
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Saving time, it seems, has a primacy that's too rarely examined.
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Women have gained access to the institutions, but not enough power to overhaul them.
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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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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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instant opinion is an oxymoron. You don't get real opinions in an instant. You get reactions.
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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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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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You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.
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I regard this novel as a work without redeeming social value, unless it can be recycled as a cardboard box.
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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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She goes in with a prejudice and comes out with a statistic.
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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.
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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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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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It has begun to occur to me that life is a stage I'm going through.
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