Naomi Ragen quotes:

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.

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.

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

...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.

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

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.

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.