Ellen Goodman Quotes
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When speech is divorced from speaker and word from meaning, what is left is just ritual, language as ritual.
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It is, I suppose, the business of grandparents to create memories and the relative of memories: traditions. We want to lodge moments, like snapshots, in the fleeting video of time.
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Traditions are the guideposts driven deep in our subconscious minds. The most powerful ones are those we can't even describe and aren't even aware of.
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I suppose we make kids the repository of our highest ideals because children are powerless. In that way we can have ideals and ignore them at the same time.
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People have been writing premature obituaries on the women's movement since its beginning.
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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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What advertisers call brand loyalty is merely the consumer's defense against the need to waste energy differentiating among things that barely differ.
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Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers.
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We have become a nation of Kodachrome, Nikon, Instamatic addicts. But we haven't yet developed a clear idea of the ethics of picture-taking. ... Where do we get the right to bring other people home in a canister? Where did we lose the right to control our image?
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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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Statistically speaking, the Cheerful Early Riser is rejected more completely than a member of any other subculture, save those with boot odor.
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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.
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If women can sleep their way to the top, how come they aren't there?
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I vote because it's what small-d democracy is about. Because there are places where people fight for generations and stand for hours to cast a ballot knowing what we ought to remember: that it makes a difference. Not always a big difference. Not always an immediate difference. But a difference.
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Our 'mistakes' become our crucial parts, sometimes our best parts, of the lives we have made.
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We spend January 1st walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives...not looking for flaws, but for potential.
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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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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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We continually want to unmask our heroes as if there were more to be learned from their nakedness than from their choice of clothing.
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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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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.
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Ultimately, time is all you have and the idea isn't to save it, but to savour it.
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The things we hate about ourselves aren't more real than things we like about ourselves.
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She goes in with a prejudice and comes out with a statistic.
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Most people do not consider dawn to be an attractive experience - unless they are still up.
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There is so much more information about the scientific world than there was a generation ago that we have all increased our opportunities for ignorance. There are more things not to know. ... The machinery that we deal with is so much more complex that it is possible to become dysfunctional at a much higher level of performance.
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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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You can believe in women's rights without believing that every woman is right.
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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."
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