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

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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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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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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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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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
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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 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 believe every one of us possesses a fundamental right to tell our own story.
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 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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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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There is a theme that runs through my work, and that is: the toxic property of keeping secrets.
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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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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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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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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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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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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Many women my age have known the experience of giving up crucial parts of themselves to please the man they love.
Joyce Maynard