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The truth is that we can overhaul our surroundings, renovate our environment, talk a new game, join a new club, far more easily than we can change the way we respond emotionally. It is easier to change behavior than feelings about that behavior.

Ellen Goodman

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Ellen Goodman
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 11
Journalist
Newton
Massachusetts
Way
Easier
Surroundings
Environment
Emotionally
Game
Join
Games
Respond
Talk
Club
Feelings
Clubs
Truth
Easily
Renovate
Change
Behavior
Overhaul

More quotes by Ellen Goodman

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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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She goes in with a prejudice and comes out with a statistic.
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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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I regard this novel as a work without redeeming social value, unless it can be recycled as a cardboard box.
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I think most of us become self-critical as soon as we become self-conscious.
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Saving time, it seems, has a primacy that's too rarely examined.
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Taboos are falling across our culture like dominoes. What was unspeakable yesterday dominates talk shows today.
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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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On television, journalists now routinely appear on talk-shows-with-an-attitude where they are encouraged to say what they think about something they may not have finished thinking about.
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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.
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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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instant opinion is an oxymoron. You don't get real opinions in an instant. You get reactions.
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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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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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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?
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Maybe this year, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives not looking for flaws, but looking for potential.
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The things we hate about ourselves aren't more real than things we like about ourselves.
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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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Women have gained access to the institutions, but not enough power to overhaul them.
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