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.
BEVERLY CLEARYI had a bad time in school in the first grade. Because I had been a rather lonely child on a farm, but I was free and wild and to be shut up in a classroom – there were 40 children on those days in the classroom, and it was quite a shock.
More Beverly Cleary Quotes
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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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As a child, I disliked books in which children learned to be ‘better’ children.
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The key to writing successful YA is to keep the adults out of the story as much as possible.
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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 wanted to be a ballerina. I changed my mind.
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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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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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I don’t necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that’s most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there.
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I enjoy writing for third and fourth graders most of all.
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I grew up before there were strict leash laws.
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Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.
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I am not a pest,” Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.
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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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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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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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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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If she can’t spell, why is she a librarian? Librarians should know how to spell.
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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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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 very observant child. The boys in my books are based on boys in my neighborhood growing up.
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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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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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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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Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school.
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Didn’t the people who made those license plates care about little girls named Ramona?
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