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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
Well
First
Writing
Happen
Things
Maybe
Think
Write
Thinking
Happens
Wells
Firsts

More quotes by 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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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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She goes in with a prejudice and comes out with a statistic.
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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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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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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.
Ellen Goodman
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Civility, it is said, means obeying the unenforceable.
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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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You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.
Ellen Goodman
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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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instant opinion is an oxymoron. You don't get real opinions in an instant. You get reactions.
Ellen Goodman
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Women have gained access to the institutions, but not enough power to overhaul them.
Ellen Goodman
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Welfare is ... the victim of national compassion fatigue.
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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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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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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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?
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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What he labels sexual, she labels harassment.
Ellen Goodman
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Parents remain our touchstones, fellow travelers, even after death. They are both missing and present.
Ellen Goodman