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.
BEVERLY CLEARYDon’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.
More Beverly Cleary Quotes
-
-
I think the best teachers had a real interest in the subject they were teaching and a love for children.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
I am not a pest,” Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
Didn’t the people who made those license plates care about little girls named Ramona?
BEVERLY CLEARY -
I was a great reader of fairy tales. I tried to read the entire fairy tale section of the library.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
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.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
If you don’t see the book you want on the shelves, write it.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
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 CLEARY -
Nothing in the whole world felt as good as being able to make something from a sudden idea.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
Quite often somebody will say, What year do your books take place? and the only answer I can give is, In childhood.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
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 -
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.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
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 -
I didn’t start out writing to give children hope, but I’m glad some of them found it.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
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.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
I enjoy writing for third and fourth graders most of all.
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 -
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.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
I don’t ever go on the Internet. I don’t even know how it works.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
I had a very wise mother. She always kept books that were my grade level in our house.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
I just wrote about childhood as I had known it.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
She means well, but she always manages to do the wrong thing. She has a real talent for it.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
People are usually surprised to hear this, but I don’t really read children’s books.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
If she can’t spell, why is she a librarian? Librarians should know how to spell.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
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.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
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.
BEVERLY CLEARY