Barbara Grizzuti Harrison Quotations

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

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.

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.

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

Belief in the absence of illusions is itself an illusion.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Food is my drug of choice.

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

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 ...

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

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

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.

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.

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

Facts mean nothing to wounded feelings ...

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

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.

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

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

To sleep is an act of faith.

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.

Belief sometimes precedes understanding; faith sometimes precedes scientific evidence.

[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.

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

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.

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

the gardens of our childhood are all beautiful.

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

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

What you desire you call into being ...

The dream police will not let me have sexual fantasies.

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 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.

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

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

truth ... is the first casualty of tyranny.

Unhappiness makes beggars or accountants of us all.

Weather creates character.

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

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).

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.

Silence is the garment of light.

All our loves are contained in all our other loves.

The best work is a fusion of love and praise.

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.

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

The past can be tamed and controlled.

The past is a sorry country.

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.

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

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.

Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.

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

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.

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

Desire creates its own object.

All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.

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

My mother was my first jealous lover ...

Porches are America's lost rooms.

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.