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.
BEVERLY CLEARYRamona 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.
More Beverly Cleary Quotes
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I am not a pest,” Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.
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Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school.
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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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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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If you don’t see the book you want on the shelves, write it.
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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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If she can’t spell, why is she a librarian? Librarians should know how to spell.
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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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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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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 grew up before there were strict leash laws.
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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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I didn’t start out writing to give children hope, but I’m glad some of them found 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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