The Best of Us Quotes

“Not all at once, but gradually, over the months, another revelation came to me: None of that other stuff, much as I'd loved it, was what made a marriage. Not restaurant dinners or romantic vacations. Not walks on the beach or visits to wine country in the Boxster. Not oysters and martinis or moonlight over the Bay Bridge."
"This was a marriage. As uncomfortable and inconvenient and devastating as it might be to live as we did now, we inhabited this place together.”
― Joyce Maynard, The Best of Us

“Every night, as we sat down together at the table, I still took Jim's hand and closed my eyes before we lifted our forks, our silent prayer."
"There was no need to ask what we prayed for, though I would add three words to the end of it."
"Remember this moment.”
― Joyce Maynard, The Best of Us

“The thing about hope is that it provides the motivation to try.”
― Joyce Maynard, The Best of Us

“And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.”
― Joyce Maynard, The Best of Us

“Endlessly reexamining old injuries, picking at the scabs, and because this was so, unable to heal them.”
― Joyce Maynard, The Best of Us

“I’m a lucky man,” he said, so softly now we had to bend in close to hear. “I have been known.”
― Joyce Maynard, The Best of Us

“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.”
― Joyce Maynard, The Best of Us

“Where was the drama in happiness? If there was no trouble present, what kept the story alive?”
― Joyce Maynard, The Best of Us

“(Drama: an addiction of mine, maybe. To look at my history, at least, you would have had to consider that possibility.)”
― Joyce Maynard, The Best of Us

“Those fourteen months had shaken me to my core, to the point where I no longer knew anything for sure except that parents should not look to their children to meet their needs. You don't adopt a child because you need more love in your life. You had better have the love part figured out already.”
― Joyce Maynard, The Best of Us

“Not until we learned of his illness, and we walked the path of that terrible struggle together, did I understand what it meant to be a couple - to be a true partner and to have one. I learned the full meaning of marriage only as mine was drawing to a close. I discovered what love was as mine departed the world. This is our story.”
― Joyce Maynard, The Best of Us

“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”
― Joyce Maynard, The Best of Us

“But it has been my way—as a woman, but also as a writer—to speak of the kinds of human experience so many of us are taught to believe we should keep hidden. I am speaking here of those so-called “shameful” emotions like envy, anger, self-pity, vanity, pride—the moments I believe all of us experience in which we display our least heroic but possibly most human selves. Over my many years as a writer, I”
― Joyce Maynard, The Best of Us