Ellen Goodman quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Ellen Goodman

Ellen Goodman Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Ellen Goodman on Wise Famous Quotes.

I regard this novel as a work without redeeming social value, unless it can be recycled as a cardboard box.

We continually want to unmask our heroes as if there were more to be learned from their nakedness than from their choice of clothing.

Values are not trendy items that are casually traded in.

How come pleasure never makes it on to ... a dutiful list of do's and don'ts? Doesn't joy also get soft and flabby if you neglect to exercise it?

People have been writing premature obituaries on the women's movement since its beginning.

What he labels sexual, she labels harassment.

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."

The same people who tell us that smoking doesn't cause cancer are now telling us that advertising cigarettes doesn't cause smoking.

What advertisers call brand loyalty is merely the consumer's defense against the need to waste energy differentiating among things that barely differ.

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.

You can teach someone who cares to write columns, but you can't teach someone who writes columns to care.

Parents remain our touchstones, fellow travelers, even after death. They are both missing and present.

Most people do not consider dawn to be an attractive experience
unless they are still up.

Kerry asks Americans to look at the evidence. Bush asks people to believe.

When speech is divorced from speaker and word from meaning, what is left is just ritual, language as ritual.

Welfare is ... the victim of national compassion fatigue.

Traditions are the guideposts driven deep in our subconscious minds. The most powerful ones are those we can't even describe, aren't even aware of.

I vote because even the lesser of two evils is the lesser of two evils.

When we describe what the other person is really like, I suppose we often picture what we want. We look through the prism of our need.

Women have gained access to the institutions, but not enough power to overhaul them.

In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right.

Taboos are falling across our culture like dominoes. What was unspeakable yesterday dominates talk shows today.

The things we hate about ourselves aren't more real than things we like about ourselves.

We want our children to fit in and to stand out. We rarely address the conflict between these goals.

She goes in with a prejudice and comes out with a statistic.

Saving time, it seems, has a primacy that's too rarely examined.

[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.

I think most of us become self-critical as soon as we become self-conscious.

It's self-deceptive to think we're in a post-feminist world when we never tried a feminist world.

Our 'mistakes' become our crucial parts, sometimes our best parts, of the lives we have made.

Civility, it is said, means obeying the unenforceable.

In today's amphetamine world of news junkies, speed trumps thoughtfulness too often.

Ultimately, time is all you have and the idea isn't to save it, but to savour it.

You can believe in women's rights without believing that every woman is right.

It has begun to occur to me that life is a stage I'm going through.

Instant opinion is an oxymoron. You don't get real opinions in an instant. You get reactions.

Call me a cockeyed pessimist, but I'm having trouble finding any good news in the trashing of Harriet Miers.

Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers.

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.

Maybe this year, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives not looking for flaws, but looking for potential.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

If women can sleep their way to the top, how come they aren't there?

The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children ourweigh our fears

Age is an accumulation of life and loss. Adulthood is a series of lines crossed.

Statistically speaking, the Cheerful Early Riser is rejected more completely than a member of any other subculture, save those with boot odor.

Forty is ... an age at which people have histories and options. At thirty, they had perhaps less history. At fifty, perhaps fewer options.

We owned what we learned back there; the experience and the growth are grafted into our lives.

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.