Life & Wisdom Quote by Joyce Maynard

The chill in Maynard's line is how calmly it admits a lasting allegiance to someone who had already expelled her. "Sent me away" is deliberately passive, almost polite, as if exile were a routine errand rather than a power move. It softens the violence of the act while preserving its hierarchy: he acts, she is acted upon. That grammatical imbalance is the point.

Then comes the more revealing confession: she "continued to believe" in "his standards and expectations" as "the best ones". Not just reasonable, not even admirable - best. Maynard isn't describing a breakup so much as an afterlife of authority, the way a charismatic older figure can install a private moral code in a younger person's head and leave it running long after they've exited the room. The subtext is less romantic longing than indoctrination: when devotion survives rejection, it's often because the rejection is part of the system that made devotion feel earned.

Context matters because Salinger isn't merely an ex; he's Salinger, a cultural monument with a mystique built on withdrawal and control. Maynard's phrasing echoes the broader literary ecosystem that teaches proximity to genius is worth almost any indignity. Her sentence also reads like a writer diagnosing her own apprenticeship - how the desire to be "good enough" can get mistaken for love, and how standards can become shackles when they're borrowed from someone who benefits from your self-erasure.

It's an unshowy line that lands because it refuses melodrama. The restraint is the indictment.