Ramona loves the world with ferocity; she does not so much want to disturb it as she yearns to discover, to turn it over, examine every piece and crook and marvel at why each creature, commodity, and substance exists the way it does. “She was a girl who could not wait. Life was so interesting she had to find out what happened next,” explains Cleary in Ramona the Pest.

“It was thus,” wrote one woman later, “that our war began.”

"One of the arguments for a woman president is that probably no one will see her as a savior who will do it alone. Leaders beget followers, and followers are people who’ve surrendered some of their own vital capacities to think and to act. Waiting to be rescued is often the real disaster. Pity the land full of people sitting about waiting for a hero."