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.
BEVERLY CLEARYHe 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.
More Beverly Cleary Quotes
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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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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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I think the best teachers had a real interest in the subject they were teaching and a love for children.
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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 grew up before there were strict leash laws.
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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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What interests me is what children go through while growing up.
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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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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 was an only child; I didn’t have a sister, or sisters.
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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 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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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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Children want to do what grownups do.
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I don’t ever go on the Internet. I don’t even know how it works.
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As a child, I disliked books in which children learned to be ‘better’ children.
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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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All knowledge is valuable to a librarian.
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I read my books aloud before they were published.
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Nothing in the whole world felt as good as being able to make something from a sudden idea.
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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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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 just wrote about childhood as I had known it.
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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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Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.
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