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 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 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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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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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 am not a pest,” Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.
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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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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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Nothing in the whole world felt as good as being able to make something from a sudden idea.
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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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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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Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.
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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 wanted to be a ballerina. I changed my mind.
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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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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 was a very observant child. The boys in my books are based on boys in my neighborhood growing up.
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