Barbara Grizzuti Harrison quotes:

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.

Belief sometimes precedes understanding; faith sometimes precedes scientific evidence.

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

Porches are America's lost rooms.

All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.

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

In memory Venice is always magic.

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

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

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

My mother was my first jealous lover ...

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Insanity is a lack of proportion.

there are no inanimate objects ...

The best work is a fusion of love and praise.

The past can be tamed and controlled.

Weather creates character.

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).

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

Unhappiness makes beggars or accountants of us all.

truth ... is the first casualty of tyranny.

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

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

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.

Silence is the garment of light.

All our loves are contained in all our other loves.

The past is a sorry country.

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

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

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

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

Desire creates its own object.

Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.

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.

To sleep is an act of faith.

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

[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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Food is my drug of choice.

Facts mean nothing to wounded feelings ...

In the face of evil, detachment is a dubious virtue.

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

The dream police will not let me have sexual fantasies.

What you desire you call into being ...

Collecting is like sex; satisfaction renews and creates new appetites.

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

the gardens of our childhood are all beautiful.

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