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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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Joyce Maynard
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: November 5
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Durham
New Hampshire
Daphne Joyce Maynard
Imagine
Perfect
Making
Inspirational
Children
Would
Succeeded
Life
Shock
World
Rest

More quotes by Joyce Maynard

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To share our stories is not only a worthwhile endeavor for the storyteller, but for those who hear our stories and feel less alone because of it.
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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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 continued to protect him with my silence.
Joyce Maynard
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I believe every one of us possesses a fundamental right to tell our own story.
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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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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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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It troubles me that people speak about writing for money as ugly and distasteful.
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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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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It's not only children who grow. Parents do too.
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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[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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For 25 years, I did take my responsibilities as a pleaser of others sufficiently seriously.
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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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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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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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