Barbara Grizzuti Harrison Quotes

49 Sourced Quotes

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

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
Italians' relationship to food is loving, informal, and gay.

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
Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.

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

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

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
There is something worse than dying, and that is humiliation — at least so it seemed to me.

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

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
All is waiting and all is work; all is change and all is permanence.

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

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

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison