Barbara Grizzuti Harrison Quotes

To live exhilaratingly in and for the moment is deadly serious work, fun of the most exhausting sort

Kindness and intelligence don't always deliver us from the pitfalls and traps: there are always failures of love, of will, of imagination. There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.

All is waiting and all is work; all is change and all is permanence.

Belief sometimes precedes understanding; faith sometimes precedes scientific evidence.

The islands of Italy combine all the elements - fire, water, earth, and air - and that is irresistible.

To surrender one's vulnerable body to water has always seemed to me a limpid act of will that has no coutnerpart or equal, unless it is sex.

Italians do not regard food as merely fuel. They regard it as medicine for the soul, one of life's abiding pleasures.

The best work is a fusion of love and praise.

We are all proprietary toward cities we love. 'Ah, you should have seen her when I loved her!' we say, reciting glories since faded or defiled, trusting her to no one else; that others should know and love her in her present fallen state (for she must fall without our vigilant love) is a species of betrayal.

Desire creates its own object.

Facts mean nothing to wounded feelings ...

The gardens of our childhood are all beautiful.

The past is a sorry country.

Great unhappiness is incompatible with the belief that it will ever end.

It's the perpetually unfinished quality of housework that makes it oppressive - it never ends, like bad psychoanalysis, or a dream interrupted. It is paradoxically true that it is exactly this daily re-creation of the world that lends housekeeping its nobility and romance.

Beware of people carrying ideas. Beware of ideas carrying people.

Silence is the garment of light.

The most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.

I love medieval cities; they do not clamor for attention; they possess their souls - their riches - in quiet; formal, courteous, they reveal themselves slowly, stone by stone, garden by garden; hidden treasures wait calmly to be loved and yield to introspective wandering.

To have a crisis, and act upon it, is one thing. To dwell in perpetual crisis is another.

Unhappiness makes beggars or accountants of us all.

Grief does not end and love does not die and nothing fills its graven place. With grace, pain is transmuted into the gold of wisdom and compassion and the lesser coin of muted sadness and resignation; but something leaden of it remains, to become the kernel arond which more pain accretes (a black pearl): one pain becomes every other pain ... unless one strips away, one by one, the layers of pain to get to the heart of the pain - and this causes more pain, pain so intense as to feel like evisceration.

Belief in the absence of illusions is itself an illusion.

Sometimes I think that just not thinking of oneself is a form of prayer ...

Persecution always acts as a jell for members of cults; it proves to them, in the absence of history, liturgy, tradition, and doctrine, that they are God's chosen.

[On Werner Erhard, founder of est:] If I wanted a new belief system, I'd choose to believe in God - He's been in business longer than Werner, and He has better music.

The dream police will not let me have sexual fantasies.

There are places one comes home to that one has never been to ...

I don't think I know a single woman who knows what she looks like.

One feels a quickening of the pulse when one crosses a border.

Insanity is a lack of proportion.

Women's propensity to share confidences is universal. We confirm our reality by sharing.

To sleep is an act of faith.

There is something worse than dying, and that is humiliation - at least so it seemed to me ...

It's perfectly possible to hate one's fat and to love one's body at the same time.

The real reason women fall in love abroad is not that they are free of domestic inhibitions but that they translate their love of stone and place into love of flesh ... Is this true?

To offer the complexities of life as an excuse for not addressing oneself to the simpler, more manageable (trivial) aspects of daily existence is a perversity often indulged in by artists, husbands, intellectuals
and critics of the Women's Movement.

If there is one lesson Rome teaches, it is that matter is good; in Rome the holy and the homely rise and converge.

Illness is regarded as a crime, and crime is regarded as illness ...

Violence is its own anesthetist. The numbness it induces feels very much like calm.

Nothing is more democratic, less judgmental, than water. Water doesn't care whether flesh is withered or fresh; it caresses aged flesh and firm flesh with equal love.

My mother was my first jealous lover ...

Italy offers one the most priceless of all one's possessions - one's own soul.

The past can be tamed and controlled.

True revolutionaries are like God - they create the world in their own image. Our awesome responsibility to ourselves, to our children, and to the future is to create ourselves in the image of goodness, because the future depends on the nobility of our imaginings.

There are no inanimate objects ...

I refuse to believe that trading recipes is silly. Tuna Fish casserole is at least as real as corporate stock.

Children hold us hostage; they represent our commitment to the future.

In memory Venice is always magic.

One can be tired of Rome after three weeks and feel one has exhausted it; after three months one feels that one has not even scratched the surface of Rome; and after six months one wishes never to leave it.

Italians' relationship to food is loving, informal, and gay ...

There are no original ideas. There are only original people.