Barbara Grizzuti Harrison Quotes

Porches are America's lost rooms.

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

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

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.

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

All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.

To sleep is an act of faith.

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.

Food is my drug of choice.

Facts mean nothing to wounded feelings.

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

The best work is a fusion of love and praise.

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

truth ... is the first casualty of tyranny.

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

My mother was my first jealous lover.

[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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Desire creates its own object.

Unhappiness makes beggars or accountants of us all.

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).

Weather creates character.

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

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

The past is a sorry country.

The past can be tamed and controlled.

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

There are no inanimate objects.

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

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

All our loves are contained in all our other loves.

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

In memory Venice is always magic.

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

Silence is the garment of light.

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

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

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

Insanity is a lack of proportion.

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

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

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.

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

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