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.
Ellen Goodmanwomen 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.
Ellen GoodmanYou can teach someone who cares to write columns, but you can’t teach someone who writes columns to care.
Ellen GoodmanWe continually want to unmask our heroes as if there were more to be learned from their nakedness than from their choice of clothing.
Ellen GoodmanWe want our children to fit in and to stand out. We rarely address the conflict between these goals.
Ellen GoodmanThe central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears.
Ellen GoodmanWithout even knowing it, we are assaulted by a high note of urgency all the time. We end up pacing ourselves to the city rhythm whether or not it's our own. In time we even grow hard of hearing to the rest of the world. Like a violinist stuck next to the timpani, we may lose the ability to hear our own instrument.
Ellen GoodmanYou can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.
Ellen GoodmanWe 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?
Ellen GoodmanWhat do I want to take home from my summer vacation? Time. The wonderful luxury of being at rest. The days when you shut down the mental machinery that keeps life on track and let life simply wander. The days when you stop planning, analyzing, thinking and just are. Summer is my period of grace.
Ellen GoodmanWhen 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.
Ellen GoodmanThis 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.
Ellen GoodmanIn journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right.
Ellen GoodmanWe each have a litany of holiday rituals and everyday habits that we hold on to, and we often greet radical innovation with the enthusiasm of a baby meeting a new sitter. We defend against it and - not always, but often enough - reject it. Slowly we adjust, but only if we have to.
Ellen GoodmanOnce 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.
Ellen GoodmanAll 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.
Ellen GoodmanMaybe this year, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives not looking for flaws, but looking for potential.
Ellen GoodmanParents remain our touchstones, fellow travelers, even after death. They are both missing and present.
Ellen GoodmanI 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.
Ellen GoodmanThe 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.
Ellen GoodmanIt 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.
Ellen GoodmanWe may never know why Joe Ellis fabricated a heroic past. But we know that the life he embellished has deeply diminished the life he'd earned.
Ellen Goodmanwe have made an extraordinary transition. From moral absolutes to moral relativism. ... Moral problems become medical ones and yesterday's sinners become today's patients.
Ellen GoodmanI 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.
Ellen GoodmanWe owned what we learned back there; the experience and the growth are grafted into our lives.
Ellen GoodmanI am a member of a small, nearly extinct minority group, a kind of urban lost tribe who insist, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, on the sanctity of being on time. Which is to say that we On-timers are compulsively, unfashionably prompt, that there are only handfuls of us in any given city and, unfortunately, we never seem to have appointments with each other.
Ellen GoodmanStatistically speaking, the Cheerful Early Riser is rejected more completely than a member of any other subculture, save those with boot odor.
Ellen GoodmanOn television, journalists now routinely appear on talk-shows-with-an-attitude where they are encouraged to say what they think about something they may not have finished thinking about.
Ellen GoodmanTaboos are falling across our culture like dominoes. What was unspeakable yesterday dominates talk shows today.
Ellen GoodmanHow many of the people I know - sons and daughters - have intricate abstract expressionist paintings of their mothers, created out of their own emotions, attitudes, hands. And how many have only Polaroid pictures of their fathers.
Ellen GoodmanI 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.
Ellen Goodmaninstant opinion is an oxymoron. You don't get real opinions in an instant. You get reactions.
Ellen GoodmanWhat advertisers call brand loyalty is merely the consumer's defense against the need to waste energy differentiating among things that barely differ.
Ellen GoodmanThe 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.
Ellen GoodmanIn the biotech revolution, it is the human body, not iron or steel or plastic, that's at the source. Are the biocapitalists going to be allowed to dig without consent into our genetic codes, then market them?
Ellen GoodmanWhen you live alone, you can be sure that the person who squeezed the toothpaste tube in the middle wasn't committing a hostile act.
Ellen GoodmanMy 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.
Ellen GoodmanMy 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."
Ellen Goodman