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.
BEVERLY CLEARYChildren want to do what grownups do.
More Beverly Cleary Quotes
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With twins, reading aloud to them was the only chance I could get to sit down. I read them picture books until they were reading on their own.
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I was an only child; I didn’t have a sister, or sisters.
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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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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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She means well, but she always manages to do the wrong thing. She has a real talent for it.
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If you don’t see the book you want on the shelves, write it.
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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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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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All knowledge is valuable to a librarian.
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I wanted to be a ballerina. I changed my mind.
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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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My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening. She read mainly travel books.
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Children want to do what grownups do.
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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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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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If she can’t spell, why is she a librarian? Librarians should know how to spell.
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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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I was a very observant child. The boys in my books are based on boys in my neighborhood growing up.
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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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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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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 didn’t start out writing to give children hope, but I’m glad some of them found it.
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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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I enjoy writing for third and fourth graders most of all.
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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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