Naomi Ragen Quotes

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 . . .

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 most terrible thing about terrorism, the thing that people fond of saying "one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist" didn't get, was that even siding with the terrorists gave you no immunity. The terrorist never knew his victims, and didn't give a damn. When you sided with them, you were taking sides against yourself.

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

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.

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

...this was the only answer she'd ever found to evil: to go on living and to help others live in happiness.

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

Of course, everyone had heard of the Ten Commandments, but these things, so much subtler, so embedded in the stuff of everyday human life and human interactions--this was the ultimate goal of all Jewish life: justice, kindness, charity, Holiness.

He who gives life, nourishes life. He listens, this I can tell you. Whatever happens, He's listening. He doesn't always answer right away. He doesn't always say yes. But He's listening. This much I promise you.

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".

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.

What is wrong with life is human memory, she thought. What is the point of life and history--all that human beings sacrifice and endure, overcome and rejoice over--if we do not remember? What point are the centuries, years, months, hours, minutes, if they slip through our fingers, if we learn nothing?

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 there was nothing left to gain, nothing more to lose, when one was face-to-face with the moment of greatest despair, to speak to God in love and thanks, rather than to curse Him and one's fate, was the ultimate choice of any human creature, and perhaps the ultimate expression of one's humanity.