Ellen Goodman
When I was at 'Newsweek' magazine - which, you know, this really sounds like I walked four miles in the snow to school - but I started at 'Newsweek' magazine in 1963, which was before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. So it was actually legal to discriminate against women, and 'Newsweek' did.Collection: Legal
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?Collection: Parenting
Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to a job that you need so you can pay for the clothes, car and the house that you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it.Collection: Work
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.Collection: Relationship
In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right.
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.
Most people do not consider dawn to be an attractive experience - unless they are still up.
Values are not trendy items that are casually traded in.
The things we hate about ourselves aren't more real than things we like about ourselves.
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.
We owned what we learned back there; the experience and the growth are grafted into our lives.
I regard this novel as a work without redeeming social value, unless it can be recycled as a cardboard box.
You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.
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.
Call me a cockeyed pessimist, but I'm having trouble finding any good news in the trashing of Harriet Miers.
It's self-deceptive to think we're in a post-feminist world when we never tried a feminist world.
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.
I think that having a job in journalism, despite all of the changes, is still a fantastic way to be - make a living observing your society and having a chance to use your voice.
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.Collection: New Year
Ultimately, time is all you have and the idea isn't to save it, but to savour it.Collection: Ideas
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.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Sad Love
It has begun to occur to me that life is a stage I'm going through.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Love
The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears.Collection: Inspirational
Maybe this year, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives not looking for flaws, but looking for potential.Collection: Inspiring
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.Collection: Stories
Taboos are falling across our culture like dominoes. What was unspeakable yesterday dominates talk shows today.Collection: Fall
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?Collection: Exercise
instant opinion is an oxymoron. You don't get real opinions in an instant. You get reactions.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Toothpaste
Our 'mistakes' become our crucial parts, sometimes our best parts, of the lives we have made.Collection: Mistake
We want our children to fit in and to stand out. We rarely address the conflict between these goals.Collection: Children
Forty is ... an age at which people have histories and options. At thirty, they had perhaps less history. At fifty, perhaps fewer options.Collection: People
Age is an accumulation of life and loss. Adulthood is a series of lines crossed.Collection: Loss
Civility, it is said, means obeying the unenforceable.Collection: Mean
People have been writing premature obituaries on the women's movement since its beginning.Collection: Writing
women who once aspired to the image of superwoman now worry about becoming superdrudge. Those who wanted to have it all now ask whether they have to do it all.Collection: Worry
Women have gained access to the institutions, but not enough power to overhaul them.Collection: Enough
Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers.Collection: Holocaust
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."Collection: Father
In today's amphetamine world of news junkies, speed trumps thoughtfulness too often.Collection: News
If women can sleep their way to the top, how come they aren't there?Collection: Success
My generation is the first in my species to have put fitness next to godliness on the scale of things. Keeping in shape has become the imperative of our middle age. The heaviest burden of guilt we carry into our forties is flab. Our sense of failure is measured by the grade on a stress test.Collection: Fitness
Statistically speaking, the Cheerful Early Riser is rejected more completely than a member of any other subculture, save those with boot odor.Collection: Morning
I would like to say we're at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.Collection: Past
Saving time, it seems, has a primacy that's too rarely examined.Collection: Time
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.Collection: Yesterday
We continually want to unmask our heroes as if there were more to be learned from their nakedness than from their choice of clothing.Collection: Hero
Everyone who deals with teens seems to agree that the most important and toughest job is staying in connection and conversation ... not delivering a lecture but saying what we think.Collection: Jobs