211 Quotes by Beverly Cleary

As a child I very much objected to books that tried to teach me something. I just wanted to read for pleasure, and I did.

Ramona was filled with the glory of losing her first tooth and love for her teacher. Miss Binney had said she was brave! This day was the most wonderful day in the world! The sun shone, the sky was blue, and Miss Binney loved her.

Clank, crash, clank. Ramona forgot about her father being out of a job, she forgot how cross he had been since he gave up smoking, she forgot about her mother coming home tired from work and about Beezus being grouchy lately. She was filled with joy.

She felt good from making a lot of noise, she felt good from the hard work from walking so far in her tin can stilts, she felt good from calling a grown-up pieface and from the triumph of singing backwards from ninety-nine to one. She felt good from being out after dark with the rain on her face and the streetlights shining down on her.

Miss Binney stood in front of her class and began to read aloud from Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, a book that was a favorite of Ramona’s because, unlike so many books for her age, it was neither quiet and sleepy nor sweet and pretty.

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.

No family is perfect. Get that idea out of your head. And nobody is perfect either. All we can do is work at it. And we do.

Nobody understood what is was like to be six-years-old and the littlest in the family.

Pest was a fighting word to Ramona, because it was unfair. She was not a pest, at least not all the time. She was only littler than everyone else in the family, and no matter how hard she tried, she could not catch up.