Problem solving, and I don’t mean algebra, seems to be my life’s work. Maybe it’s everyone’s life’s work.
BEVERLY CLEARYToday 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.
More Beverly Cleary Quotes
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I grew up before there were strict leash laws.
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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 read my books aloud before they were published.
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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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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 was a very observant child. The boys in my books are based on boys in my neighborhood growing up.
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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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I am not a pest,” Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.
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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 was a great reader of fairy tales. I tried to read the entire fairy tale section of the library.
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Children want to do what grownups do.
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Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.
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All knowledge is valuable to a librarian.
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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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Didn’t the people who made those license plates care about little girls named Ramona?
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As a child, I disliked books in which children learned to be ‘better’ children.
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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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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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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 ever go on the Internet. I don’t even know how it works.
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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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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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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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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 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 enjoy writing for third and fourth graders most of all.
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