Padraic Cleary Quotes

It's not worth getting upset about, Mrs. Dominic. Down in the city they don't know how the other half lives, and they can afford the luxury of doting on their animals as if they were children. Out here it's different. You'll never see man, woman or child in need of help go ignored out here, yet in the city those same people who dote on their pets will completely ignore a cry of help from a human being. ~ Colleen McCullough

My mother always kept library books in the house, and one rainy Sunday afternoon - this was before television, and we didn't even have a radio - I picked up a book to look at the pictures and discovered I was reading and enjoying what I read. ~ Beverly Cleary

To Meath of the pastures,
From wet hills by the sea,
Through Leitrim and Longford,
Go my cattle and me. ~ Padraic Colum

There's something different about him, and I don't have to think hard to see it. Something about the way he takes over a room, the way he looks at me, like he has already identified and can disarm every one of my defense mechanisms with no effort, like he sees through them to the disaster lying beneath. And he wants it. ~ K.A. Tucker

What's wrong is that every morning and every night, I lie in bed wondering why you're not beside me. ~ K.A. Tucker

Awareness of freedom and responsibility creates anxiety, which is also referred to as anguish or angst. Aspects of romantic attachments can relieve anxieties. For example, Mario Mikulincer et al. argue that loving relationships can act as a "death-anxiety buffering mechanism", since the sense of security, protection, comfort, self-esteem, and social validation that close relationships provide may serve as defensive devices with respect to existential anxiety about the threat of mortality. ~ Skye Cleary

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

All knowledge is valuable to a librarian. ~ Beverly Cleary

I was a librarian. ~ Beverly Cleary

Her bone-white face lit up like she was at a surprise party. "Hear that, Dwyer? He called me ma'am! Stay forever if you want, big guy. Teach my son a thing or two about manners."
"He's good people," Kyle said. "Always has been."
It was the last thing I wanted to hear at that moment. "I'm not always good," I shot back.
"Ooooo, polite and a bad boy," Gina cooed. "Watch out, ladies. ~ Aaron Starmer

If I have a talent for making some fourth-grader who hates school and reading to hate it a little less, then I have to do the most with what I've been issued. ~ Brian P. 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

O farmer, strong farmer!
You can spend at the fair,
But your face you must turn
To your crops and your care ~ Padraic Colum

Emily was lucky in many ways. She was lucky in the house she lived in, a house with three balconies, a cupola, banisters just right for sliding down, and the second bathtub in Yamhill County. ~ Beverly Cleary

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

Why is this place named Burnt Boot?" Martin asked.
"Back in the days of the cattle drives old Hiram Cleary got tired of lookin' at the back end of cattle all day. He sat down right out there and pulled off his boot, threw it in the fire so he couldn't go no further, and built a store to sell stuff to the people comin' up the trail. He was an ancestor to my husband," Gladys answered. ~ Carolyn Brown

Children want to do what grownups do. ~ Beverly Cleary

Yeah,Livie?"
"How do you figure out the right way to live your life?" There's a long pause. So long that I check the screen of my cell phone to see if the call is still connected.
"Trial and error, Livie. That's the only way that I know of. ~ K.A. Tucker

Because of barriers of knowledge, barriers of state, and barriers of action, seeing your own buddha nature is like seeing color at night. ~ Thomas Cleary

The wisest chieftain is one who plans how to avoid a battle rather than how to win it. ~ Padraic Connelly

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

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

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

Mother," said Ramona urgently. This time she stepped into the hall. "Unless we get a ladder (Go back to your room, Ramona) and break the window so we can unlock it," Mother continued, speaking with one sentence inside another, the way grown-ups so often did with Ramona around. "But Mother," insisted Ramona even more urgently. "I have to - " "Oh, dear, I might have known," sighed Mother. ~ Beverly Cleary

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

Not only is love blind, it's a little hard of hearing. ~ Brian P. Cleary

He seemed grown-up, compared to the boys at school, and although he was not handsome, or even particularly good-looking - there were still some scars on his face from the skin trouble he had when he was younger - his face was agreeable because it was so ... What was the word? Kind, perhaps. Or gentle. But strong, too. He was genuinely glad to see all of Sue's family, and when Sue entered the room and he helped her on with her coat, Jean thought he acted as if her sister was someone precious to him. ~ Beverly Cleary

Oh well, thought Jane, that's how men are. He's probably taking it for granted. She found it very pleasant to be taken for granted by Stan ~ Beverly Cleary

But the boys' bicycle pack also sent a stab of envy through me. If I couldn't yet capture John Cleary with my feminine wiles, then surely I deserved to enjoy the physical abandon he got, liberties I instinctively knew were vanishing. (I know, I know. Psychoanalytic theory would label this pecker envy and seek to smack me on the nose with it. To that I'd say, o please. Of actual johnsons I had little awareness. What I coveted was privilege.) ~ Mary Karr

Do you want to be saved?" I asked.
Keri cocked an eyebrow. "Like Jesus?"
"Like Lancelot."
"I hang my hair out the window every night, waiting for some dude to climb up. ~ Aaron Starmer

I wrote books to entertain. I'm not trying to teach anything! If I suspected the author was trying to show me how to be a better behaved girl, I shut the book. ~ Beverly Cleary

I am sort of medium ... I guess you could call me the mediumest boy in the class. -Leigh Botts ~ Beverly Cleary

Girl Snouts." "We are not," contradicted Sarah. "We're Girl Scouts." "Hup, two, three, four. Hup, two, three, four," counted Mrs. Collins, who was the jolly type and did not understand how parents sometimes embarrass their children. Down the hill marched the class. Mitchell felt Bernadette's toe on his heel again and jumped in time. ~ Beverly Cleary

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

Any cupcake consumed before 9AM is, technically, a muffin. ~ Brian P. Cleary

The Buddha is like space, with no inherent nature; appearing in the world to benefit the living, his features and refinements are like reflections. ~ Thomas Cleary

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

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

Peter Koestenbaum also elaborated on the importance of others, particularly romantic lovers, in the existential context. Love is the choice to create and reflect each other mutually, verifying and illuminating each other's uniqueness because this is how we learn that we exist and who we are. A key theme of authentic love is resistance between, but welcoming of, two independent consciousness acting like positive and negative magnets within a single magnetic field. ~ Skye Cleary