27 Quotes by Naomi Ragen

. . . 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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.