Top 70 Ellen Goodman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.”

— Ellen Goodman

Featured in: Life is Hard Quotes, Depressing Quotes

2. “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.”

— Ellen Goodman

3. “Maybe this year, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives not looking for flaws, but looking for potential.”

— Ellen Goodman

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

— Ellen Goodman

5. “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.”

— Ellen Goodman

6. “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.”

— Ellen Goodman

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

— Ellen Goodman

8. “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.”

— Ellen Goodman

9. “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.”

— Ellen Goodman

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

— Ellen Goodman

11. “In 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 Goodman

12. “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.”

— Ellen Goodman

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

13. “What 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 Goodman

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

— Ellen Goodman

15. “In today’s amphetamine world of news junkies, speed trumps thoughtfulness too often.”

— Ellen Goodman

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

— Ellen Goodman

17. “What he labels sexual, she labels harassment.”

— Ellen Goodman

18. “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.””

— Ellen Goodman

19. “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?”

— Ellen Goodman

20. “Most people do not consider dawn to be an attractive experience – unless they are still up.”

— Ellen Goodman

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

— Ellen Goodman

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

— Ellen Goodman

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

— Ellen Goodman

24. “Traditions are the guideposts driven deep in our subconscious minds. The most powerful ones are those we can’t even describe and aren’t even aware of.”

— Ellen Goodman

25. “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.”

— Ellen Goodman

26. “I vote because even the lesser of two evils is the lesser of two evils.”

— Ellen Goodman

27. “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.”

— Ellen Goodman

28. “Civility, it is said, means obeying the unenforceable.”

— Ellen Goodman

29. “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.”

— Ellen Goodman

30. “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 Goodman

31. “Taboos are falling across our culture like dominoes. What was unspeakable yesterday dominates talk shows today.”

— Ellen Goodman

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

— Ellen Goodman

33. “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.”

— Ellen Goodman

34. “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.”

— Ellen Goodman

35. “Saving time, it seems, has a primacy that’s too rarely examined.”

— Ellen Goodman

36. “I think most of us become self-critical as soon as we become self-conscious.”

— Ellen Goodman

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

— Ellen Goodman

38. “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?”

— Ellen Goodman

39. “Our ‘mistakes’ become our crucial parts, sometimes our best parts, of the lives we have made.”

— Ellen Goodman

40. “The same people who tell us that smoking doesn’t cause cancer are now telling us that advertising cigarettes doesn’t cause smoking.”

— Ellen Goodman

41. “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.”

— Ellen Goodman

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

— Ellen Goodman

43. “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.”

— Ellen Goodman

44. “She goes in with a prejudice and comes out with a statistic.”

— Ellen Goodman

45. “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.”

— Ellen Goodman

46. “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.”

— Ellen Goodman

47. “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.”

— Ellen Goodman

48. “When speech is divorced from speaker and word from meaning, what is left is just ritual, language as ritual.”

— Ellen Goodman

49. “People have been writing premature obituaries on the women’s movement since its beginning.”

— Ellen Goodman

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

— Ellen Goodman