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 CLEARYAll knowledge is valuable to a librarian.
More Beverly Cleary Quotes
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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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Didn’t the people who made those license plates care about little girls named Ramona?
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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 an only child; I didn’t have a sister, or sisters.
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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.
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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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What interests me is what children go through while growing up.
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As a child, I disliked books in which children learned to be ‘better’ children.
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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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The key to writing successful YA is to keep the adults out of the story as much as possible.
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I am not a pest,” Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.
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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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Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school.
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My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening. She read mainly travel books.
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She means well, but she always manages to do the wrong thing. She has a real talent for it.
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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 had a very wise mother. She always kept books that were my grade level in our house.
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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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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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Don’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.
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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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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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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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I didn’t start out writing to give children hope, but I’m glad some of them found it.
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I enjoy writing for third and fourth graders most of all.
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