Barbara Grizzuti Harrison Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.

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.

To sleep is an act of faith.

The best work is a fusion of love and praise.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unhappiness makes beggars or accountants of us all.

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

Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.

Silence is the garment of light.

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

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

The past is a sorry country.

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

Weather creates character.

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.

I refuse to believe that trading recipes is silly.

Tuna Fish casserole is at least as real as corporate stock.

If there is one lesson Rome teaches, it is that matter is good;

in Rome the holy and the homely rise and converge.

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.

In memory Venice is always magic.

Belief sometimes precedes understanding; faith sometimes precedes scientific evidence.

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

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

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?

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.

Italians do not regard food as merely fuel.

They regard it as medicine for the soul, one of life's abiding pleasures.

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.

the gardens of our childhood are all beautiful.

The dream police will not let me have sexual fantasies.

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.

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).

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

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