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.
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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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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Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.
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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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If you don’t see the book you want on the shelves, write it.
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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 ever go on the Internet. I don’t even know how it works.
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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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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 wanted to be a ballerina. I changed my mind.
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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 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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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 think the best teachers had a real interest in the subject they were teaching and a love for children.
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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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I just wrote about childhood as I had known it.
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