Beverly Cleary Quotes

I was called 'Dumbo,' like the elephant, as a child because I couldn't understand things at school.

School is a scary place for kids. So I didn't like it, and I didn't want to be there. And it was a great day for me when they threw me out.

What I do remember about first grade and that year was that it was very lonely. I didn't have any friends, and I wasn't allowed to go to the cafeteria or play on the playground. What bothered me most was the loneliness in school every day.

I wasn't dyslexic, I was just very slow. I passed my time daydreaming.

It got so bad that by the time I was graduated, the only reading I did was in order to get the grade and the only writing I did was in order to get the grade.

I have always had school sickness, as others have seasickness. I cried when it was time to go back to school long after I was old enough to be ashamed of such behavior.

I always thought I had a problem socially, because I was pulled out of school so early. I had a tough time talking to other kids and being comfortable with them.

Every time we moved on, I joined a different class in a different school with different girls until, aged 13, my father had taken the decision to pull me out of school altogether. Everything I needed, he reasoned, could be found within the rich language of Shakespeare's plays at which, by then, I was something of an old hand.

I was very active but I was dyslexic and had a really hard time at school.

I had lots of trouble in school as a child, and I lost confidence. Teachers thought I was stupid. I learned to read very late, when I was 11. Dyslexia wasn't recognized then, and the assumption was you were incapable of thinking.

So by the time I got to Michigan I was a stutterer. I couldn't talk. So my first year of school was my first mute year and then those mute years continued until I got to high school.

I had a few really bad years in school, just from not fitting in and being bullied. It was kind of brilliant being a military brat, though, because when you're in that kind of situation, you just think, 'I only have to hang on for another year, because then we'll move. It'll be fine if I can just get out of here.'

My special thing as a kid was to play dead because I thought I was really good at it. When I was 7 or 8, I even did it in the bathroom with a hair dryer in the bathtub. I realized that I was good at it because each time my mom would scream.

During first grade, I spent nearly every afternoon for months in the school nurse's office, sick with psychosomatic headaches, begging to go home; by third grade, stomachaches had replaced the headaches, but my daily trudge to the infirmary remained the same.

I didn't know a time when there wasn't a war because I spent all my time from the age of two or three to eight in a coal cellar really.

I eventually just imagined being a little boy who was quote unquote 'normal': who could learn like all the kids around me that I felt excluded from. And I imagined myself into one of these and into someone who could read.

I began to speak well at a very advanced age - 15, 16, 17 years old. It was psychological: the trauma of war, my family and growing up on my own. I was more or less a street kid.

I grew up in a family that was multifaceted, sexually oriented, and pretty much open to everything. And because I was working, my friends were all adults. I had a tough time going to different schools because people knew me from films and I was the fat child who got beaten up every day.

By the time I was 5, I was already an outcast. It was the early 1960s, and I was part of the only Jewish family in a decidedly Christian suburb of Waltham, Mass.

I failed first grade, which is my biggest problem. You always feel like a failure, like you're stupid.

I was told so many times when I was a kid, 'I can't be friends with you, you're too intense, you're too sad all the time.' I really thought that when I made the first album that everyone would understand me, all the people who weren't my friends would become my friends.

That's not to say that some day I won't go outside again, but I'm having a great time working on this process.

I went to school with butterflies of fear every day for years - from primary school onwards - not just worried about being bullied by classmates, but by teachers.

In my first few years of elementary school at the Edison School in Detroit, I did poorly. I remember worrying that I might fail the second grade and be held back.

I never thrived in high school.