Problem solving, and I don’t mean algebra, seems to be my life’s work. Maybe it’s everyone’s life’s work.
BEVERLY CLEARYThe 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.
More Beverly Cleary Quotes
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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 was a very observant child. The boys in my books are based on boys in my neighborhood growing up.
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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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If she can’t spell, why is she a librarian? Librarians should know how to spell.
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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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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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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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The key to writing successful YA is to keep the adults out of the story as much as possible.
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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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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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I 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.
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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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I am not a pest,” Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.
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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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