Quotes from Joyce Maynard

I've had some wonderful successes and some extreme disappointments in my career and my life.

She felt everything too deeply, it was like the world was too much for her.

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.

A person who deserves my loyalty receives it.

The real drug, I came to believe, was love.

No, I said. I didn't remember that. There was so much to remember, sometimes the best thing was to forget.

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)

It's like life: sometimes the littlest thing turns out to be the most important.

If you act like something's too hard, it will be, he said. You got to believe it's possible.

There was a way of looking at the world where practically every single thing that happened had some kind of double meaning.

She was in love with love.

A lot of your problem was in your head. You see yourself screwing up, it's going to happen.

There is something about the act of studying an unclothed body, as an artist does, that allows a person to appreciate it as pure form, regardless of the kinds of traits traditionally regarded as imperfections. In a figure drawing class, an obese woman's folds of flesh take on a kind of beauty. You can look at a man's shrunken chest or legs or buttocks with tenderness. Age is not ugly, just poignant.

It's a great thing when a man knows how to dance, she said. When a man can dance, the world is his oyster. Adele, Henry's Mother

Sex is a drug, Eleanor had told me. When sex enters into a situation, people lose all reason. They do things they would never do otherwise. These things they do may be crazy. May even be dangerous. May break their hearts, or someone else's... The real drug, I came to believe, was love.

She felt everything so deeply, it was like the world was too much for her.

sometimes the littlest thing turns out to be the most important.

The portrait of my parents is a complicated one, but lovingly drawn.

No doubt Richard's father, like my mother, had once held his infant son in his arms, looked into the eyes of his child's mother, and believed they would move into the future together with love. The fact that they didn't was a weight each of us carried, as every child does, probably, whose parents no longer live under the same roof. Wherever it is you make your home, there is always this other place, this other person, calling to you. Come to me. Come back.

My mother didn't believe in germs but I did. Germs are something they made up to distract people from what they should really be worried about, she said. Germs are natural. It's the things people do you have to worry about.

tragedy and death would follow a person whereever he went in life. There was no such thing as escape, except maybe the kind that Mr. Kirby had accomplished...

I tried to think of what my father would tell me. 'Don't let any boy give you shit.' But he'd never said how we should go about preventing this.

It was as if I'd been in the middle of a book that I had to put down when I got too tired to keep reading, or a video put on pause. I wanted to pick back up with the story and find out what happened to the characters, except that the characters were us.

Ten years from now, her mother might not even recognize her. Already she was different, but the day would come when she'd be this person her mother had never seen. There would be other people - someone like Carolyn or Alan, or even Violet - who had known her longer than her mother ever did.