Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Joyce Maynard
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: November 5
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Durham
New Hampshire
Daphne Joyce Maynard
Child
Parenthood
Often
Messy
Realities
Stuff
Educational
Reality
Exciting
Children
Deal
Smelly
Deals
Enriching
Parent
Exhausting

More quotes by Joyce Maynard

Image
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
Image
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
Image
I believe every one of us possesses a fundamental right to tell our own story.
Joyce Maynard
Image
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
Image
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
Image
It troubles me that people speak about writing for money as ugly and distasteful.
Joyce Maynard
Image
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
Image
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
Image
It's not only children who grow. Parents do too.
Joyce Maynard
Image
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
Image
Those who rhapsodize about the ease and joy of childhood have perhaps forgotten what it's like to be 12 years old.
Joyce Maynard
Image
I continued to protect him with my silence.
Joyce Maynard
Image
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
Image
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
Image
A good home must be made, not bought.
Joyce Maynard
Image
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
Image
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
Image
[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
Image
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
Image
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