Quotes from Ellen Goodman

All in all, I am not surprised that the people who want to unravel the social contract start with young adults. Those who are urged to feel afraid, very afraid, have both the greatest sense of independence and the most finely honed skepticism about government.

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

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.

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

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.

There's a trick to the 'graceful exit.' It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, or a relationship is over — and let it go. It means leaving what's over without denying its validity or its past importance to our lives. It involves a sense of future, a belief that every exit line is an entry, that we are moving up, rather than out.

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.

I have never been especially impressed by the heroics of people convinced they are about to change the world. I am more awed by those who struggle to make one small difference.

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 lived. In the end, it's the family stories that are worth the storage.

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

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.

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.

Civility, it is said, means obeying the unenforceable.

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

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

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

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

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.

[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.

Those inevitable dreams where you can't get your column in, you know, and at first they were the Xerox telecopy, and then they were the fax machine, and then they were, you know, email. The anxiety remains the same, but the technology has changed.

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.

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.

The women's movement was always going to work in two parts. With one part, we'd break open the doors that were closed to women, and with the other part, we'd walk through, transforming society for men and women. Turns out it was a lot easier to open the doors.