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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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Ellen Goodman
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 11
Journalist
Newton
Massachusetts
Fall
Dominates
Shows
Unspeakable
Today
Taboo
Like
Falling
Yesterday
Across
Talk
Dominoes
Culture
Taboos

More quotes by 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.
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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 think most of us become self-critical as soon as we become self-conscious.
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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 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?
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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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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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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.
Ellen Goodman
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Saving time, it seems, has a primacy that's too rarely examined.
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What he labels sexual, she labels harassment.
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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Welfare is ... the victim of national compassion fatigue.
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.
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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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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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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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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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Parents remain our touchstones, fellow travelers, even after death. They are both missing and present.
Ellen Goodman
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She goes in with a prejudice and comes out with a statistic.
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