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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

the gardens of our childhood are all beautiful.

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.

Belief sometimes precedes understanding; faith sometimes precedes scientific evidence.

Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.

What you desire you call into being.

The dream police will not let me have sexual fantasies.

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

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.

There are no inanimate objects.

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.

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.

Desire creates its own object.

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.

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

Unhappiness makes beggars or accountants of us all.

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

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.

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.

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?