I read my books aloud before they were published.
BEVERLY CLEARYI wanted to be a ballerina. I changed my mind.
More Beverly Cleary Quotes
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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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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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I don’t think children’s inner feelings have changed. They still want a mother and father in the very same house; they want places to play.
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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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As a child, I disliked books in which children learned to be ‘better’ children.
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If she can’t spell, why is she a librarian? Librarians should know how to spell.
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I think the best teachers had a real interest in the subject they were teaching and a love for children.
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My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening. She read mainly travel books.
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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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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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Didn’t the people who made those license plates care about little girls named Ramona?
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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 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.
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If we finished our work, the teacher would say, ‘Now don’t read ahead.’ But sometimes I hid the book I was reading behind my geography book and did read ahead. You can hide a lot behind a geography book.
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I am not a pest,” Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.
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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 wanted to be a ballerina. I changed my mind.
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Problem solving, and I don’t mean algebra, seems to be my life’s work. Maybe it’s everyone’s life’s work.
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Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.
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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 just wrote about childhood as I had known it.
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The humiliation that Jane had felt turned to something else–grief perhaps, or regret. Regret that she had not known how to act with a boy, regret that she had not been wiser.
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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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Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school.
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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 don’t ever go on the Internet. I don’t even know how it works.
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