Ellen Goodman (née Holtz; born April 11, 1941) is an American journalist and syndicated columnist. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1980. She is also a speaker and commentator.
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.
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.
In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right.
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?
Values are not trendy items that are casually traded in.
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 value.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I rewrite a great deal. I'm always fiddling, always changing something. I'll write a few words - then I'll change them. I add. I subtract. I work and fiddle and keep working and fiddling, and I only stop at the deadline.
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 central paradox of motherhood is that while our children become the absolute center of our lives, they must also push us backout in the world. . . . But motherhood that can narrow our lives can also broaden them. It can make us focus intensely on the moment and invest heavily in the future.
We continually want to unmask our heroes as if there were more to be learned from their nakedness than from their choice of clothing.
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.
In today's amphetamine world of news junkies, speed trumps thoughtfulness too often.
Who's counting? It was, of course, the minority who were counting. It always is. Most of the women I know today would dearly like to use their fingers and toes for some activity more enthralling than counting. They have been counting for so long. But the peculiar problem of the new math is that every time we stop adding, somebody starts subtracting. At the very least (the advanced students will understand this) the rate of increase slows. . . . The minority members of any group or profession have two answers: They can keep score or they can lose.
Saving time, it seems, has a primacy that's too rarely examined.
The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears.
She goes in with a prejudice and comes out with a statistic.