1.
Porches are America's lost rooms.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
2.
The most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
3.
There are no original ideas. There are only original people.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
4.
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
5.
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
6.
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
7.
There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
8.
All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
9.
To sleep is an act of faith.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
10.
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
11.
Food is my drug of choice.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
12.
Facts mean nothing to wounded feelings.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
13.
There is something worse than dying, and that is humiliation - at least so it seemed to me.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
14.
The best work is a fusion of love and praise.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
15.
Women's propensity to share confidences is universal. We confirm our reality by sharing.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
16.
truth ... is the first casualty of tyranny.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
17.
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
18.
Rome is all things high and low. It is like God, it accommodates so much.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
19.
My mother was my first jealous lover.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
20.
[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
21.
Great unhappiness is incompatible with the belief that it will ever end.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
22.
To live exhilaratingly in and for the moment is deadly serious work, fun of the most exhausting sort
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
23.
Beware of people carrying ideas. Beware of ideas carrying people.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
24.
There are places one comes home to that one has never been to.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
25.
Every generation reinvents the wheel - and in the process it often adds to rather than subtracts from a woman's burdens.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
26.
Insanity is a lack of proportion.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
27.
to have a crisis, and act upon it, is one thing. To dwell in perpetual crisis is another.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
28.
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
29.
the gardens of our childhood are all beautiful.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
30.
I love cloisters, which are the architectural equivalent of a theological concept: perfect freedom within set boundaries.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
31.
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
32.
Belief sometimes precedes understanding; faith sometimes precedes scientific evidence.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
33.
Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
34.
What you desire you call into being.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
35.
The dream police will not let me have sexual fantasies.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
36.
In the face of evil, detachment is a dubious virtue.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
37.
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
38.
the islands of Italy combine all the elements - fire, water, earth, and air - and that is irresistible.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
39.
There are no inanimate objects.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
40.
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
41.
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
42.
Desire creates its own object.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
43.
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
44.
Violence is its own anesthetist. The numbness it induces feels very much like calm.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
45.
Unhappiness makes beggars or accountants of us all.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
46.
One feels a quickening of the pulse when one crosses a border.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
47.
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
48.
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
49.
Silence is the garment of light.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
50.
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
