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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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Joyce Maynard
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: November 5
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Durham
New Hampshire
Daphne Joyce Maynard
Growing
Raising
Knowing
Besides
Child
Divorce
Mother
Hardly
Remember
Worked
Anything
Whose
Fifties
Ever
Parents
Sixties
Children
Parent
Sixty

More quotes by Joyce Maynard

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[On home births:] In a house where there had been three people, there were now four, although no one had come in the door.
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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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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My job is writing. I get paid to do it. When was the last time you heard someone challenge a doctor for making money off of cancer?
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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If I told you about all the stories I don't tell, I would be violating the very boundaries I set for myself.
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 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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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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More than any other setting - more than battlefields or boardrooms or a spaceship headed for intergalactic travel - I'll put my money on the family to provide an endless source of comedy, tragedy and intrigue.
Joyce Maynard
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Imagine if you succeeded in making the world perfect for your children what a shock the rest of life would be for them.
Joyce Maynard
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A good home must be made, not bought.
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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It's not only children who grow. Parents do too.
Joyce Maynard
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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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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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You lay your hand against his skin and just rib his back. Blow into his ear. Press that baby up against your own skin and walk outside with him, where the night air will sourround him, and moonlight fall on his face. Whistle, maybe. Dance. Hum. Pray. (how to calm a crying baby)
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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At Home in the World is the story of a young woman, raised in some difficult circumstances, and how she survives. It tells a story of redemption, not victimhood.
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