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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Quote - 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.](https://minimalistquotes.com/images/in-seventh-grade-i-found-a-place-on-the-libraryshe.jpg)
