I grew up before there were strict leash laws.
BEVERLY CLEARYShe was not a slowpoke grownup. She was a girl who could not wait. Life was so interesting she had to find out what happened next.
More Beverly Cleary Quotes
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All knowledge is valuable to a librarian.
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I feel sometimes that in children’s books there are more and more grim problems, but I don’t know that I want to burden third- and fourth-graders with them.
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I was a great reader of fairy tales. I tried to read the entire fairy tale section of the library.
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I had a very wise mother. She always kept books that were my grade level in our house.
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I hope children will be happy with the books I’ve written, and go on to be readers all of their lives.
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She means well, but she always manages to do the wrong thing. She has a real talent for it.
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I have lovely memories of Los Angeles in the 1930s. I came down to live with my mother’s cousin and they invited me to come and go to junior college for a year.
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I was a very observant child. The boys in my books are based on boys in my neighborhood growing up.
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I didn’t start out writing to give children hope, but I’m glad some of them found it.
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I am not a pest,” Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.
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I just wrote about childhood as I had known it.
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Otis was inspired by a boy who sat across the aisle from me in sixth grade. He was a lively person. My best friend appears in assorted books in various disguises.
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He was dressed as if everything he wore had come from different stores or from a rummage sale, except that the crease in his trousers was sharp and his shoes were shined.
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Didn’t the people who made those license plates care about little girls named Ramona?
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When I was in the first grade I was afraid of the teacher and had a miserable time in the reading circle, a difficulty that was overcome by the loving patience of my second grade teacher. Even though I could read, I refused to do so.
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We didn’t have television in those days, and many people didn’t even have radios. My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening.
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Children want to do what grownups do.
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Ramona stepped back into her closet, slid the door shut, pressed an imaginary button, and when her imaginary elevator had made its imaginary descent, stepped out onto the real first floor and raced a real problem. Her mother and father were leaving for Parents’ Night.
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Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school.
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In my grammar school years back in the 1920s I used my ten-cents-a-week allowance for Saturday matinees of Douglas Fairbanks movies. All that swashbuckling and leaping about in the midst of the sails of ships!
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Today I discovered two kinds of people who go to high school: those who wear new clothes to show off on the first day, and those who wear their oldest clothes to show they think school is unimportant.
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Quite often somebody will say, What year do your books take place? and the only answer I can give is, In childhood.
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In seventh grade…I found a place on the [library]shelf where my book would be if I ever wrote a book, which I doubted.
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I don’t ever go on the Internet. I don’t even know how it works.
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I enjoy writing for third and fourth graders most of all.
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Don’t stop now. Go ahead! Be readers all of your lives. And don’t forget, librarians and teachers can help you find the right books to read.
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