"I wanted to be a ballerina. I changed my mind"
About this Quote
A childhood dream collapses in eight brisk words, and Beverly Cleary makes the collapse feel like a punchline you can trust. "I wanted to be a ballerina. I changed my mind" is funny because it refuses to romanticize the pivot. No soaring narrative about destiny, no inspirational montage of grit. Just desire, then revision. The flatness is the point: she’s treating reinvention as ordinary, not sacred.
Cleary came of age when girls were handed a narrow menu of "acceptable" fantasies, and ballerina sits there like a glossy stereotype of disciplined femininity. By naming it, she nods to the cultural script; by dropping it without apology, she quietly mocks the idea that early longing is a lifelong contract. The sentence break does real work: the first line is all aspiration and softness, the second is blunt agency. That period is a tiny door slam.
The subtext reads like a manifesto for her fiction. Cleary wrote children who were allowed to be changeable, contradictory, sometimes wrong, and still worthy of attention. Ramona doesn’t become lovable by being consistently charming; she becomes real by being unpredictably herself. In that light, "I changed my mind" is less about ballet than about permission: permission to outgrow a fantasy, to disappoint an imagined version of yourself, to choose a life that fits better than the one that photographs well.
It’s also a writer’s origin story in miniature. Ballerina is performance; author is observation. Cleary’s genius was noticing the everyday and treating it like it mattered. Changing her mind is how she found her subject.
Cleary came of age when girls were handed a narrow menu of "acceptable" fantasies, and ballerina sits there like a glossy stereotype of disciplined femininity. By naming it, she nods to the cultural script; by dropping it without apology, she quietly mocks the idea that early longing is a lifelong contract. The sentence break does real work: the first line is all aspiration and softness, the second is blunt agency. That period is a tiny door slam.
The subtext reads like a manifesto for her fiction. Cleary wrote children who were allowed to be changeable, contradictory, sometimes wrong, and still worthy of attention. Ramona doesn’t become lovable by being consistently charming; she becomes real by being unpredictably herself. In that light, "I changed my mind" is less about ballet than about permission: permission to outgrow a fantasy, to disappoint an imagined version of yourself, to choose a life that fits better than the one that photographs well.
It’s also a writer’s origin story in miniature. Ballerina is performance; author is observation. Cleary’s genius was noticing the everyday and treating it like it mattered. Changing her mind is how she found her subject.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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