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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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Ellen Goodman
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 11
Journalist
Newton
Massachusetts
Real
Oxymoron
Reactions
Opinions
Instant
Opinion

More quotes by Ellen Goodman

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In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right.
Ellen Goodman
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In today's amphetamine world of news junkies, speed trumps thoughtfulness too often.
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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I regard this novel as a work without redeeming social value, unless it can be recycled as a cardboard box.
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She goes in with a prejudice and comes out with a statistic.
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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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It has begun to occur to me that life is a stage I'm going through.
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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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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.
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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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You can teach someone who cares to write columns, but you can’t teach someone who writes columns to care.
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In the biotech revolution, it is the human body, not iron or steel or plastic, that's at the source. Are the biocapitalists going to be allowed to dig without consent into our genetic codes, then market them?
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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Parents remain our touchstones, fellow travelers, even after death. They are both missing and present.
Ellen Goodman
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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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Civility, it is said, means obeying the unenforceable.
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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People have been writing premature obituaries on the women's movement since its beginning.
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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Maybe this year, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives not looking for flaws, but looking for potential.
Ellen Goodman