Quotes from Joyce Maynard

You had to let your children venture out in the world. You couldn't always find the Barbie shoe. Children had to know pain, or how would they ever know what to do when they encountered it? Trouble would come, no matter what. The best you could do was to raise your children in such a way that when trouble found them—as it would—they'd be able to survive it. Teach your children well.

So I drove off that day with precious cargo in the back of my truck: three flats of Edwin Plank's lovingly tended daughter plants—"my good daughters," he called them—headed for Smiling Hills Farm.

I missed being a parent as much as a person crossing the desert misses water. I missed soccer games and family meals and coming in out of the snow after sledding, dancing in

Wait until morning," Leila told me. "That's when the choir comes out. Sometimes I think I should have called this place the Bird Hotel.

place in him where memory remained, like a patch of soil the tractor has missed, where a few dry stalks of last summer's crops still stand in their withered rows, the soil not turned over.

Tammy had read this article online called "Making Your First Million on Social Media" that said ukuleles were trending, along with hydroponic gardening, tattoos, eco-friendly period products, and Boston terriers.

Eleanor saw her days with her children as a kind of artwork, and as with the practice of making art, much that you attempted didn't work out. Still, the act of doing it felt as demanding and precious as the creation of any book.

All those small injuries, sorrows, wounds, regrets—the hurtful words, the pain people inflicted on each other, intentionally or not, that seemed so important once. You might not even remember anymore what they were about, those things that once made you so angry, bitter, hurt. Or maybe you remembered, but did any of it matter, really? (Who said what? Who did what, when? Who hurt whom? Well, everybody had hurt everyone.)

Sometimes a person has to leave home to become who they need to be.

When we the moment her obsession took hold, to spare her children the pain of loss. As if any parent could do that. As if it would be a good thing, if she could...The best you could do was to raise your children in such a way that when trouble found them-- as it would--they'd be able to survive it.

When was the moment her obsession took hold, to spare her children the pain of loss. As if any parent could do that. As if it would be a good thing, if she could...The best you could do was to raise your children in such a way that when trouble found them-- as it would--they'd be able to survive it.

She was in love with love. She couldn't do anything part way. She felt everything so deeply it was like the world was too much for her. Anytime she'd hear a story about some kid who had cancer or an old man who's wife died or dog even it was like it happened to her. Like she was missing the outer layer of skin that allowed people to get through the day without bleeding all the time. The world got to be too much for her.

way his choice of me as his girlfriend—as the

Vermont, where they taught Reiki

I'm a lucky man," he said, so softly now we had to bend in close to hear. "I have been known.

A parent could no more protect her children from sorrow and loss than she could keep the sun from setting, or rising again the next day.

No experience is so terrifying, I've always said, once you turn on the light, and take a hard, clear look at the thing that most terrifies you.

It turned out that horrifying things could happen to ordinary-looking people. Unimaginable things could happen in the most regular places.

When a person gave less, he required less in return.

the most recent murder. Now she came up to me in first period to say I should sit with her at lunch. This was a definite step up from my old spot in the cafeteria. She wanted to know if my father had any new leads. "Even if it's top secret, none of us would breathe a word

You made these precious people. You hovered over them closely, your only goal impossible: to keep them out of harm's way. But sooner or later you had to let the cork people set off without you, and once you did there would be nothing for it but to stand on the shore or run along the edge yelling encouragement, praying they'd make it.

Each strand of corn silk is actually a hollow tube connected to the undeveloped mother cob. The pollen travels down the silk to the cob, where it forms a single kernel. Each kernel has its own silk attached to it. Someone up there thought of everything, because they even made it so the silk is covered with a sticky substance that catches the pollen. To make sure it doesn't just blow away.

She had yet to experience the effects of anybody's sex appeal, though she greatly admired Larry Bird—a fact that could not possibly have had anything to do with his looks.

mother when she told him one too