Beverly Cleary famous quotes

I hope children will be happy with the books I've written, and go on to be readers all of their lives.
-- Beverly Cleary

#Children #Book #Goes On

My favorite books are a constantly changing list, but one favorite has remained constant: the dictionary. Is the word I want to use spelled practice or practise? The dictionary knows. The dictionary also slows down my writing because it is such interesting reading that I am distracted.
-- Beverly Cleary

#Book #Reading #Writing

One rainy Sunday when I was in the third grade, I picked up a book to look at the pictures and discovered that even though I did not want to, I was reading. I have been a reader ever since.
-- Beverly Cleary

#Book #Reading #Sunday

Quite often somebody will say, What year do your books take place? and the only answer I can give is, In childhood.
-- Beverly Cleary

#Book #Years #Giving

She was not a slowpoke grownup. She was a girl who could not wait. Life was so interesting she had to find out what happened next.
-- Beverly Cleary

#Girl #Interesting #Waiting

Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school.
-- Beverly Cleary

#Teacher #Children #Reading

As a child, I disliked books in which children learned to be 'better' children.
-- Beverly Cleary

#Children #Book

If she can't spell, why is she a librarian? Librarians should know how to spell.
-- Beverly Cleary

#Librarian #Should

I had a very wise mother. She always kept books that were my grade level in our house.
-- Beverly Cleary

#Wise #Mother #Book

If you don't see the book you want on the shelves, write it.
-- Beverly Cleary

#Book #Writing #Want

Didn't the people who made those license plates care about little girls named Ramona?
-- Beverly Cleary

#Girl #People #Care

I read my books aloud before they were published.
-- Beverly Cleary

#Book

Children want to do what grownups do.
-- Beverly Cleary

#Children #Want #Grownups

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.
-- Beverly Cleary

#Mother #Father #People

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

#Children #Book #Want

What interests me is what children go through while growing up.
-- Beverly Cleary

#Children #Growing Up #Growing

I write in longhand on yellow legal pads.
-- Beverly Cleary

#Writing #Yellow #Pads

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

#School #Thinking #Clothes

I don't ever go on the Internet. I don't even know how it works.
-- Beverly Cleary

#Goes On #Internet

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

#Lonely #Children #School

I just wrote about childhood as I had known it.
-- Beverly Cleary

#Childhood

I think the best teachers had a real interest in the subject they were teaching and a love for children.
-- Beverly Cleary

#Teacher #Children #Real

I wanted to be a ballerina. I changed my mind.
-- Beverly Cleary

#Mind #Ballerina #Changed

In my grammar school years back in the 1920s I used my ten-cents-a-week allowance for Saturday matinees of Douglas Fairbanks movies. All that swashbuckling and leaping about in the midst of the sails of ships!
-- Beverly Cleary

#School #Years #Ships

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 Cleary

#Teacher #Book #Reading

My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening. She read mainly travel books.
-- Beverly Cleary

#Mother #Father #Book

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 Cleary

#Patience #Teacher #Reading

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

#Book #Reading #Chance

I am not a pest," Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.
-- Beverly Cleary

#Big Sister #Pests #Bigs

She means well, but she always manages to do the wrong thing. She has a real talent for it.
-- Beverly Cleary

#Real #Mean #Talent

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.
-- Beverly Cleary

#Regret #Grief #Boys

All her life she had wanted to squeeze the toothpaste really squeeze it,not just one little squirt...The paste coiled and swirled and mounded in the washbasin. Ramona decorated the mound with toothpaste roses as if it was a toothpaste birthday cake
-- Beverly Cleary

#Cake #Rose #Littles

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

#Mother #Real #Father

Neither the mouse nor the boy was the least bit surprised that each could understand the other. Two creatures who shared a love for motorcycles naturally spoke the same language.
-- Beverly Cleary

#Boys #Two #Motorcycle

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

#Shoes #Different #Stores

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

#Mother #Cousin #Memories

I was a great reader of fairy tales. I tried to read the entire fairy tale section of the library.
-- Beverly Cleary

#Library #Fairy Tale #Tales

Otis was inspired by a boy who sat across the aisle from me in sixth grade. He was a lively person. My best friend appears in assorted books in various disguises.
-- Beverly Cleary

#Friendship #Book #Boys

All knowledge is valuable to a librarian.
-- Beverly Cleary

#Librarian #Valuable

I enjoy writing for third and fourth graders most of all.
-- Beverly Cleary

#Writing #Enjoy #Thirds

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

#Book #Imagination #Stories

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

#Mother #Children #Father

I was an only child; I didn't have a sister, or sisters.
-- Beverly Cleary

#Sister #Children #Only Child

Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.
-- Beverly Cleary

#Needs #Bedtime

Problem solving, and I don't mean algebra, seems to be my life's work. Maybe it's everyone's life's work.
-- Beverly Cleary

#Mean #Problem #Problem Solving

I didn't start out writing to give children hope, but I'm glad some of them found it.
-- Beverly Cleary

#Children #Writing #Giving

I grew up before there were strict leash laws.
-- Beverly Cleary

#Law #Grew Up #Grew

People are usually surprised to hear this, but I don't really read children's books.
-- Beverly Cleary

#Children #Book #People

I was a very observant child. The boys in my books are based on boys in my neighborhood growing up.
-- Beverly Cleary

#Children #Growing Up #Book