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 CLEARYIf 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.
More Beverly Cleary Quotes
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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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She means well, but she always manages to do the wrong thing. She has a real talent for it.
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Didn’t the people who made those license plates care about little girls named Ramona?
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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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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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People are usually surprised to hear this, but I don’t really read children’s books.
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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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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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As a child, I disliked books in which children learned to be ‘better’ children.
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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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I am not a pest,” Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.
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Children want to do what grownups do.
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I enjoy writing for third and fourth graders most of all.
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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.
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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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