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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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Ellen Goodman
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 11
Journalist
Newton
Massachusetts
Think
Write
Thinking
Happens
Wells
Firsts
Well
First
Writing
Happen
Things
Maybe

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[E]very time you think the entertainment moguls have hit rock bottom, they reach for the jackhammer and rat-a-tat-tat a little deeper.
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I think most of us become self-critical as soon as we become self-conscious.
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The things we hate about ourselves aren't more real than things we like about ourselves.
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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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You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.
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She goes in with a prejudice and comes out with a statistic.
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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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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?
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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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Saving time, it seems, has a primacy that's too rarely examined.
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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.
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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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Taboos are falling across our culture like dominoes. What was unspeakable yesterday dominates talk shows today.
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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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Civility, it is said, means obeying the unenforceable.
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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.
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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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You can teach someone who cares to write columns, but you can’t teach someone who writes columns to care.
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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.
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In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right.
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