Best 21 quotes of Naomi Ragen on MyQuotes

Books were like old friends, with their worn covers and well-thumbed pages.

Even her hair, she thought, running her fingers impatiently through the damp golden brown ringlets that curled romantically around her face. A Botticelli angel, a boy in college once called her, begging her to let it grow. Right! That was all she needed: wild curls cascading down her back like a doomed Shakespearian virgin, or a rock star.

How do they manage to go on living?.....By loving life. And-in spite of everything-by loving God. By having enough faith to start over again and again; enough faith to risk having our hearts break all over again. That's the true meaning of faith. It's the deepest kind of heroism.

It was Vivaldi's Mandolin Concerto, Francesca Abraham realized as the radio alarm went off. Lively, unrelentingly upbeat, it was the perfect tempo in which to start the day. Covering her head with a pillow, she reached out blindly and urgently, desperate to shut the damn thing off.

...self-important western journalists who'd given up their sacred trust to become cheerleaders for trendy causes, the way communist journalists had once been cheerleaders for the government...They were depriving the free world of its most valuable weapon in condemning and exposing the worst human scourge since Nazism: the targeting and murder of civilians to achieve political and religious ends.

Suffering did different things to different people...Some souls became tempered, unshakable in their faith, while others became twisted and mis-shapen, throwing off all connection to God.

When a man and woman married, nothing they did together had any shame or immodesty. It was all in the name of God. There was fruitfulness and joy in it, and it followed the Creator's own plan for continuing the human race.

Women were naturally pure souls, on so much higher a spiritual plane to begin with than men.

He, the man, had seen her, touched her, and had not validated her beauty, her womanliness. He had turned away and gone to his own bed. Like Eve after the fall, her nakedness was obscene to her now.

He wrote such profound thoughts in such a deceptively simple way. Right off the bat, first paragraph, he tells you life is hard, that there are no simple answers, and that we should all stop moaning about it and get on with it. Love, he wrote, was action, not emotion.

If you want to change who you are, change what you want.

Indeed, there was something hard and unforgiving and almost brutal among those who considered themselves the most piously stringent in their observance, something ugly and positively vicious in their unrelenting persecution of those who deviated from their standards.

In the secular world, it was impossible to find a man who had not been infected by the worst accomplishments of feminism: the idea that women should be treated as men not only in their paychecks but also in their physical strength. Yes, she could open her own door, carry her own packages, lift heavy objects. But what woman wanted to be treated like that, unless you were a brainwashed Soviet comrade?

I understand that you are learning new things, seeing a different way of life and because you are you, you're full of enthusiasm. But let the mother you think knows nothing and is pretty much useless tell you this: people are just people. Nobody is a bigger saint than the next one; they just hide their true selves better. Sooner or later, you'll figure out for yourself that this community you're madly in love with and want so much to be a part of is just like the rest of the world.

I used to think religious people were kinder, nicer, had better characters, but I found out they're just like everybody else, just people. Some are better, some are worse. There are sincere ones . . . but also the opposite . . .

Most people were good, intelligent, responsible human beings struggling to live decent, useful lives. Why was it so many of them found that almost impossible? Was it because there were just no rules anymore, people making them us as the went along? From her own bitter experience, she saw that most good people were simply lost, bobbing around like castaways in a moral wasteland flooded with debris and ugliness, waiting to be rescued and placed on solid ground.

So many hypocrites, people busy preaching acceptance and tolerance but hating and rejecting everyone who isn't exactly like them.

So many mistakes. So many bad choices. So many tragedies and hurts brought to innocent people with the best of intentions or with no intentions at all. It was so hard to be human. It was so hard to be alive.

So you see, we are not free to choose our fate. There is a yoke to be borne and freedom is only an illusion. I am not free. God has put me here on earth for a reason.

The coming together of a man and woman was a holy thing, after all. God had chosen this way of replenishing the earth. God did everything so elegantly, with such an exquisite attention to detail. She knew this from studying the flowers in the garden and watching the morning sky, all mauve and pink and orange. So beautiful. But God had looked at all this, His ideas, His wonderful sense of color and design put into action, and had said merely that it was good. Not great. Not fantastic. Just good. But when He had looked at man and woman together, He had said it was "very good".

. . . wasn't it better to feel that when that chaos engulfed you, there was a benevolent God ready to help you through, rather than the emptiness of an indifferent universe?