Barbara Grizzuti Harrison Quotes & Sayings

Every house we have lived in, every building to which our hands have lent their work, belongs to us by virtue of love or of regret. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Belief sometimes precedes understanding; faith sometimes precedes scientific evidence. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Food is my drug of choice. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

I made the mistake of thinking that if you add up the past, you sum up the future; I forgot how frequently life astonishes us. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

The past is a sorry country. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

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. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

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. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

How do you think it would feel to be obliged to ask for a seat-belt extender on an airplane? For the unfashionably bulgy, life is a series of small humiliations. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Truth ... is the first casualty of tyranny. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Facts mean nothing to wounded feelings ... — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

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. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Every generation reinvents the wheel - and in the process it often adds to rather than subtracts from a woman's burdens. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

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. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

[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. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

There are no inanimate objects ... — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

The dream police will not let me have sexual fantasies. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

In the face of evil, detachment is a dubious virtue. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Rome is all things high and low. It is like God, it accommodates so much. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Sometimes I think that just not thinking of oneself is a form of prayer ... — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

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

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

What you desire you call into being ... — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

All our loves are contained in all our other loves. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Violence is its own anesthetist. The numbness it induces feels very much like calm. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

My mother was my first jealous lover ... — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

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

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. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

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

The best work is a fusion of love and praise. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Italy offers one the most priceless of all one's possessions - one's own soul. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Italians' relationship to food is loving, informal, and gay ... — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Beware of people carrying ideas. Beware of ideas carrying people. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Silence is the garment of light. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Insanity is a lack of proportion. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

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

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. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

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. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

One feels a quickening of the pulse when one crosses a border. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

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

To sleep is an act of faith. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

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

Unhappiness makes beggars or accountants of us all. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

All is waiting and all is work; all is change and all is permanence. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Great unhappiness is incompatible with the belief that it will ever end. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Belief in the absence of illusions is itself an illusion. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Porches are America's lost rooms. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

The past can be tamed and controlled. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

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. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

The gardens of our childhood are all beautiful. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

My love of water ... is mingled with and almost indistinguishable from a fear of water (I can float in a vertical position - I enter a fugue state - but I cannot bear to bury my face in water). — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

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

I love cloisters, which are the architectural equivalent of a theological concept: perfect freedom within set boundaries. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Children hold us hostage; they represent our commitment to the future. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

There are places one comes home to that one has never been to ... — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

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. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

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. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Illness is regarded as a crime, and crime is regarded as illness ... — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

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

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. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

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

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

Fantasies are more than substitutes for unpleasant reality; they are also dress rehearsals, plans. All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

In memory Venice is always magic. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Desire creates its own object. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Collecting is like sex; satisfaction renews and creates new appetites. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

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? — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

There are no original ideas. There are only original people. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison