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.

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.

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

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

It's self-deceptive to think we're in a post-feminist world when we never tried a feminist world.

I regard this novel as a work without redeeming social value, unless it can be recycled as a cardboard box.

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.

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.

Call me a cockeyed pessimist, but I'm having trouble finding any good news in the trashing of Harriet Miers.

Values are not trendy items that are casually traded in.

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.

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

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.

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 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?

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

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.

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

... a caricature of Mr. Military Industrial Complex.

The conference committee, that wonderful wrestling ring of compromise where House and Senate versions of bill are wrenched into law ...

…rape, incest, and me.

The same people who tell us that smoking doesn't cause cancer are now telling us that advertising cigarettes doesn't cause smoking.

Today, much of journalism and politics are in a kind of collusion to oversimplify and personalize issues. No room for ambivalence. Plenty of room for the personal attack.

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.

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.