106 Quotes by Joyce Maynard

Ava never used the phrase “have a dog.” A relationship with a dog was a mutual one, with no ownership. Most human beings were unlikely to ever experience – even with a lover, a parent, or a child – the kind of unconditional acceptance and devotion a dog will offer to the human in his or her life.

Carla always says, “I don’t like risks.” In Greg’s opinion, there’s no way to avoid them. It’s just a matter of whether you choose dangerous action or dangerous inaction.

They seemed to arrive at some form of friendship. Maybe they were like a couple of weary soldiers who went through a war together, side by side in the trenches, and having no inclination to relive the old battles found a certain comfort in the simple knowledge that they’d been young together and present at the same terrible moments of bloodshed. Even though, in their case the injury sustained there was my mother’s t the hands of my father.

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.

How does it happen that a person with whom you have shared your most intimate moments – greatest love, greatest pain, joy, also grief – can become a stranger?

It’s not only children who grow. Parents do too...

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.

A good home must be made, not bought. In the end, it’s not track lighting or a sun room that brings light into a kitchen.

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.