Children want to do what grownups do.
BEVERLY CLEARYI 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.
More Beverly Cleary Quotes
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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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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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The key to writing successful YA is to keep the adults out of the story as much as possible.
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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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If she can’t spell, why is she a librarian? Librarians should know how to spell.
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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 enjoy writing for third and fourth graders most of all.
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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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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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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 am not a pest,” Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.
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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 you don’t see the book you want on the shelves, write it.
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I wanted to be a ballerina. I changed my mind.
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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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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 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 didn’t start out writing to give children hope, but I’m glad some of them found it.
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Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.
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What interests me is what children go through while growing up.
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As a child, I disliked books in which children learned to be ‘better’ children.
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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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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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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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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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