Top 66 Barbara Grizzuti Harrison Quotes
#1. 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
#8. The islands of Italy combine all the elements - fire, water, earth, and air - and that is irresistible.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
#9. To live exhilaratingly in and for the moment is deadly serious work, fun of the most exhausting sort
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
#12. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#19. 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
#21. 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
#22. The most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
#23. 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
#24. I love cloisters, which are the architectural equivalent of a theological concept: perfect freedom within set boundaries.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
#29. Every generation reinvents the wheel - and in the process it often adds to rather than subtracts from a woman's burdens.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
#31. 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
#38. 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
#41. 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
#46. 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
#48. 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
#51. [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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. I refuse to believe that trading recipes is silly. Tuna Fish casserole is at least as real as corporate stock.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
#63. True revolutionaries are like God - they create the world in their own image. 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
#66. There is something worse than dying, and that is humiliation - at least so it seemed to me ...
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
