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I grew up before there were strict leash laws.

Beverly Cleary

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.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Cousin Memories Mother
Nothing in the whole world felt as good as being able to make something from a sudden idea.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Able Ideas World
As a child, I disliked books in which children learned to be ‘better’ children.
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Book Child Children
I didn’t start out writing to give children hope, but I’m glad some of them found it.
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Children Giving Writing
I was an only child; I didn’t have a sister, or sisters.
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Children Only Child Sister
Didn’t the people who made those license plates care about little girls named Ramona?
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Care Girl People
My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening. She read mainly travel books.
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Book Father Mother
I am not a pest,” Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.
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Big Bigs Pests Sister
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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Book Imagination Stories
I was a very observant child. The boys in my books are based on boys in my neighborhood growing up.
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Book Children Grow Up
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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Burton Father Imagination Mother Real Step
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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Children Classroom Grade Lonely School
Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school.
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Children Reading Teacher
I enjoy writing for third and fourth graders most of all.
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Enjoy Thirds Writing
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.
BEVERLY CLEARY

School Thinking Two
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.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Book Library Seventh

I grew up before there were strict leash laws.

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I grew up before there were strict leash laws.

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