Ellen Goodman Quotes Page 2

“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?”

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

“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.”

“What he labels sexual, she labels harassment.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Even if every program were educational and every advertisement bore the seal of approval of the American Dental Association, we would still have a critical problem. It's not just the programs but the act of watching television hour after hour after hour that's destructive.”

“I don't know exactly why the notion of homeownership has such a grasp on the American imagination. Perhaps as descendants of landless immigrants we turn our plots into symbols of stability.”

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

“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.”

“The average parent may, for example, plant an artist or fertilize a ballet dancer and end up with a certified public accountant. We cannot train children along chicken wire to make them grow in the right direction. Tying them to stakes is frowned upon, even in Massachusetts.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Values are not trendy items that are casually traded in.”

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

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

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