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I wanted to be a ballerina. I changed my mind.

Beverly Cleary

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

Children Classroom Grade Lonely School
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

Book Children Want
I enjoy writing for third and fourth graders most of all.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Enjoy Thirds Writing
Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Children Reading Teacher
I just wrote about childhood as I had known it.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Childhood Known
I think the best teachers had a real interest in the subject they were teaching and a love for children.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Children Real Teacher
I had a very wise mother. She always kept books that were my grade level in our house.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Book Mother Wise
If she can’t spell, why is she a librarian? Librarians should know how to spell.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Know Librarians Should
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

Algebra Mean Problem
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

Different Rummage Sales Shoes
I am not a pest,” Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Big Bigs Pests Sister
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

Cousin Memories Mother
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
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

Father Mother People
I read my books aloud before they were published.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Books Publisher Read
In seventh grade…I found a place on the [library]shelf where my book would be if I ever wrote a book, which I doubted.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Book Library Seventh

I wanted to be a ballerina. I changed my mind.

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I wanted to be a ballerina. I changed my mind.

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More Beverly Cleary Quotes