Barbara Grizzuti Harrison Quotes

49 Sourced Quotes

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

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
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
There are no original ideas. There are only original people.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
Belief in the absence of illusions is itself an illusion.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
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
My mother was my first jealous lover.

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

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

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

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

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
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
Italy offers one the most priceless of all one's possessions — one's own soul.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
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
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
Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.

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

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

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
Beware of people carrying ideas. Beware of ideas carrying people.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
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
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).

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
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.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
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
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