Life & Wisdom Quote by Beverly Cleary

Writers, Beverly Cleary suggests, are less like prophets and more like magpies: alert, opportunistic, unembarrassed about borrowing glitter from the everyday. The line flatters the craft while quietly demystifying it. “Plucking out” is a humble verb. It evokes fingers in a pocket, not a muse descending from the ceiling. That choice matters: Cleary spent a career proving that the so-called small stuff of childhood (a missing button, an unfair rule, a humiliation at school) is not small at all when you’re living inside it.

The intent is practical, almost workmanlike. Good writing isn’t produced by waiting to feel profound; it’s built from noticing. Cleary’s characters feel uncannily real because they’re composites assembled from eavesdropped cadence, remembered embarrassment, a neighbor’s odd insistence, a child’s stubborn logic. “Here and there” signals range, too: you don’t need a single grand source. You need a wide net and the nerve to pull details from disparate places and make them cohere.

The subtext carries a gentle ethical and artistic challenge. If writers are always taking, they also have to transform. Plucking isn’t theft when it becomes empathy, when the raw material is rearranged into something that clarifies experience rather than merely exploits it. In Cleary’s postwar America, domestic life and kid culture were often treated as background noise; her books elevated it into literature for young readers without condescension. This quote is her quiet manifesto: pay attention, collect the real, then make it sing.