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For 25 years, I did take my responsibilities as a pleaser of others sufficiently seriously.

Joyce Maynard

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Joyce Maynard
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: November 5
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Durham
New Hampshire
Daphne Joyce Maynard
Take
Years
Pleaser
Pleasers
Sufficiently
Responsibilities
Seriously
Responsibility
Others

More quotes by Joyce Maynard

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It's not only children who grow. Parents do too. As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours. I can't tell my children to reach for the sun. All I can do is reach for it, myself.
Joyce Maynard
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Long after Salinger sent me away, I continued to believe his standards and expectations were the best ones.
Joyce Maynard
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I continued to protect him with my silence.
Joyce Maynard
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Nothing like being visible, publishing one's work, and speaking openly about one's life, to disabuse the world of the illusion of one's perfection and purity.
Joyce Maynard
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It's sad but true that if you focus your attention on housework and meal preparation and diapers, raising children does start to look like drudgery pretty quickly. On the other hand, if you see yourself as nothing less than your child's nurturer, role model, teacher, spiritual guide, and mentor, your days take on a very different cast.
Joyce Maynard
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One of the sad realities of being a parent is that the same stuff you know is exciting, educational, and enriching in your child'slife is often messy, smelly and exhausting to deal with.
Joyce Maynard
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Those who rhapsodize about the ease and joy of childhood have perhaps forgotten what it's like to be 12 years old.
Joyce Maynard
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It troubles me that people speak about writing for money as ugly and distasteful.
Joyce Maynard
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I do not outline. There are writers I know and count as my friends who certainly do it the other way but for me part of the adventure is not knowing how it's going to turn out.
Joyce Maynard
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I have no doubt that over the years my children will find plenty of things about me to criticize. But something tells me that twenty years from now not one of them will sit on some therapist's couch complaining because their mother didn't spend enough time vacuuming up glitter.
Joyce Maynard
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Many women my age have known the experience of giving up crucial parts of themselves to please the man they love.
Joyce Maynard
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I had known there had been a serial killer on Mount Tamalpais, and it felt so incongruous in such a beautiful, peaceful spot.
Joyce Maynard
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The vehemence with which certain critics have chosen not simply to criticize what I've written, but to challenge my writing this story at all, speaks of what the book is about: fear of disapproval.
Joyce Maynard
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I have long observed that the act of writing is viewed, by some, as an elite and otherworldly act, all the more so if a person isn't paid for what she writes.
Joyce Maynard
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A good home must be made, not bought.
Joyce Maynard
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The painter who feels obligated to depict his subjects as uniformly beautiful or handsome and without flaws will fall short of making art.
Joyce Maynard
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Wherever it is you make your home, there is always this other place, this other person, calling to you. Come to me. Come back.
Joyce Maynard
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There is a theme that runs through my work, and that is: the toxic property of keeping secrets.
Joyce Maynard
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Growing up in the fifties and sixties, I can only remember knowing one child, ever, whose parents got a divorce, and hardly any whose mother worked at anything besides raising her children.
Joyce Maynard
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If a man wishes to truly not be written about, he would do well not to write letters to 18-year-old girls, inviting them into his life.
Joyce Maynard