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

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

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

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
All our loves are contained in all our other loves.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
To surrender one's vulnerable body to water has always seemed to me a limpid act of will that has no counterpart or equal, unless it is sex.

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

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
My mother was my first jealous lover.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
Illness is regarded as a crime, and crime is regarded as illness.

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

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
I refuse to believe that trading recipes is silly. Tuna-fish casserole is at least as real as corporate stock.

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

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

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

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

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

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
Belief sometimes precedes understanding; faith sometimes precedes scientific evidence.

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
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
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
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
Belief in the absence of illusions is itself an illusion.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
The islands of Italy combine all the elements — fire, water, earth, and air — and that is irresistible.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
Love is the only game that is not called on account of darkness.

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

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison