Quotes from Joyce Maynard

THE NEXT DAY THEY FOUND the body of Charlene Gray lying in a thicket of young madrone just below the Steep Ravine Trail, near where it intersected with Little Salmon Creek.

a person would need more than one good kick to stop a murderer.

I had developed, early on, the habit of low expectations, and of letting my life be directed by whatever person happened to come along who seemed to know better than I did what they were doing.

His badness thrilled and amazed me.

The people she used to have, with whom she might have discussed losing her parents, were the parents she'd lost. But the larger truth was that she couldn't have talked to them about it anyway. Martin and Vivian had died that night, but they had been largely absent forever.

killed before her, had been covered in tape, in the

Even as a kid, I always had the ability to see down the line to where trouble lay, or truth. George used to complain that I expected the worst out of life, but it wasn't that. I simply recognized that just because the sun was shining one day didn't mean it would the next. Frost would come, and so would snow. The fact of rain did not rule out the possibility of drought. You could call it pessimism. I based my attitudes on what I saw in the world around me. Not what I dreamed up.

Some family's boad capsized at Lake Winnipesaukee the day before and now they were looking for the father's body.

Maybe loving her children too much was her downfall—the weight it placed on the three of them, knowing that for their mother they represented everything of greatest meaning in her life. No question their father loved them, too, but without the heavy sense of obligation her devotion seemed to carry with it.

This was always her problem, of course. That her children's sorrows became hers. She felt their pain so deeply, she hardly registered her own.

We lived less like husband and wife, it seemed, than affectionate brother and sister. I told myself there were worse things a person could say about her life than that.

Like you're out in the ocean and the undertow catches you and you start yelling for help, but then you look around, and all around you in the water for as far as you can see, there's all these other people flailing too.

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.

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

The big dramas that fascinate me are the quiet ones that happen behind closed doors in so-called ordinary families.

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.

I was giving a speech one time, and the woman who introduced me said, 'Well, she used to be J. D. Salinger's girlfriend. I thought, 'God, is that all I've been?' I didn't want to be reduced to that.

I think of myself as a realistic writer, not a creator of soap opera or melodrama.

Some literary types subscribe to the notion that being a writer like Salinger entitles a person to remain free of the standards that might apply to mere mortals.

If people choose to live their life in a way that does not confront the more troubling aspects of their experience, that's fine, if it works for them. But it will probably make them uncomfortable if they come up against somebody like me. So they just shouldn't! They shouldn't read my work!

I had known there had been a serial killer on Mount Tamalpais, and it felt so incongruous in such a beautiful, peaceful spot.

Long after Salinger sent me away, I continued to believe his standards and expectations were the best ones.

Many women my age have known the experience of giving up crucial parts of themselves to please the man they love.

There is a theme that runs through my work, and that is: the toxic property of keeping secrets.