Count the Ways Quotes

“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.”
― Joyce Maynard, Count the Ways

“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?”
― Joyce Maynard, Count the Ways

“That August, the day of the lunar eclipse—their daughters three and a half and two—Cam piled everyone in the truck to get the best view from the top of Hopewell Hill. “Maybe they won’t remember,” he said. “I just like to show them things.” This was what you did. You took your children out in the darkness to watch the moon disappear. You dissected coyote scat with them. You led your two-year-old down to the garden to press a handful of radish seeds into the soil and handed her the spatula to lick when you made chocolate pudding and turned the pages of Richard Scarry’s What Do People Do All Day?, pointing out the animal characters and naming their jobs. You gathered autumn leaves, pressed them with an iron in between two sheets of wax paper, and taped them on the window, where you’d set an avocado seed in a glass of water to watch it sprout; and carried your three-year-old outside in your arms at night—her and her sister—to let them catch snowflakes. Who knew what they’d remember, and what they’d make of it, but the hope was there that if nothing else, what they would hold on to from these times was the knowledge of being deeply loved.”
― Joyce Maynard, Count the Ways

“Sometimes a person has to leave home to become who they need to be.”
― Joyce Maynard, Count the Ways

“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.”
― Joyce Maynard, Count the Ways

“Observing this, Bonnie Henderson—wife of the third baseman—rolled her eyes. Bonnie was that other type of mother, whose parenting philosophy, if she had one, mainly involved giving her two sons a large bag of cheese puffs and a Coke at the beginning of every game and shooting a stream of ice-cold water from her boys’ squirt guns in their direction any time one of them acted up. Back before kids, she’d worked as a corrections officer at the state prison, and still employed a few of her old techniques.”
― Joyce Maynard, Count the Ways

“Sometimes you leave a place because you don’t like being there. Sometimes you have to leave because you love it too much.”
― Joyce Maynard, Count the Ways

“The best you could do was to raise your children in such a way that when trouble”
― Joyce Maynard, Count the Ways

“found them—as it would—they’d be able to survive it.”
― Joyce Maynard, Count the Ways

“What did a parent want more than for her children to be their true selves, live their fullest lives?”
― Joyce Maynard, Count the Ways

“all the best things I’ve ever done come out of the things I’ve learned raising my children.”
― Joyce Maynard, Count the Ways

“manifesting the strength and confidence and tenacity to pursue whatever it is you most want to do with your life.”
― Joyce Maynard, Count the Ways

“For me, being a feminist means”
― Joyce Maynard, Count the Ways

“This was the terrible part of being a parent. The more you loved, the more you had to lose.”
― Joyce Maynard, Count the Ways

“Et on se retrouvait là finalement, on ouvrait les yeux comme après un long sommeil, un peu étourdi, clignant des paupières dans l’éclat du soleil, simplement heureux d’être à cet endroit et de se réveiller. Voilà ce que ressentait Eleanor, de retour dans la maison de sa jeunesse pour le mariage de son premier enfant. Se concentrant sur la seule chose importante : sa famille, à nouveau réunie. Cabossée et meurtrie comme un groupe de soldats de la guerre de Sécession revenant d’Appomattox (peu importe à quel camp ils appartenaient), mais toujours bien vivants.”
― Joyce Maynard, Count the Ways

“Eleanor knew he did for her, he might drop by with a half dozen ears of Silver Queen corn, or pop over to till up a flower bed. He kept his hands busy with tools.”
― Joyce Maynard, Count the Ways

“Sometimes, Eleanor reflected, it might be better for a person to remember less.”
― Joyce Maynard, Count the Ways

“wish I had a river I could skate away on.”
― Joyce Maynard, Count the Ways

“the cork people who drifted away. This was where her children were now. Not quite out of sight, but”
― Joyce Maynard, Count the Ways

“Someone was leaving. Someone was staying. The situation was clearly terminal. They were standing around waiting for the last breath of their marriage. They were beyond valentines.”
― Joyce Maynard, Count the Ways

“She was back in Crazyland now.”
― Joyce Maynard, Count the Ways

“sad and silent little stranger.”
― Joyce Maynard, Count the Ways

“It was as if their whole house was a zero-gravity chamber, Ursula thought. They were all floating around like astronauts, waving their arms, turning upside down or sideways, doing these normal kinds of things like eating Jell-O or getting toothpaste out of the tube, except the Jell-O just hung there in the air waiting for one of them to get a”
― Joyce Maynard, Count the Ways

“The thing you love isn’t the person’s brain,” she said. “It’s the person.”
― Joyce Maynard, Count the Ways

“They would not forget this or anything else about that afternoon. It was the last day of their old wonderful life.”
― Joyce Maynard, Count the Ways

“conjured his sisters back home by the sheer force of his yearning for them.”
― Joyce Maynard, Count the Ways

“This is my radical act,” she had told the young Harvard woman. “Raising three human beings who will go out and change the world.”
― Joyce Maynard, Count the Ways

“This was her artwork. This family.”
― Joyce Maynard, Count the Ways

“You showed your children the world. It was up to them to determine what they’d make of it.”
― Joyce Maynard, Count the Ways

“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”
― Joyce Maynard, Count the Ways