Belief sometimes precedes understanding; faith sometimes precedes scientific evidence.
Barbara Grizzuti HarrisonItalians do not regard food as merely fuel. They regard it as medicine for the soul, one of life's abiding pleasures.
Barbara Grizzuti HarrisonI love cloisters, which are the architectural equivalent of a theological concept: perfect freedom within set boundaries.
Barbara Grizzuti HarrisonEvery 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 HarrisonWomen's propensity to share confidences is universal. We confirm our reality by sharing.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison[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 HarrisonPersecution 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 HarrisonIt'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 HarrisonFantasies 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 HarrisonOur 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 HarrisonThe 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 HarrisonHow 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 HarrisonI 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 HarrisonSometimes I think that just not thinking of oneself is a form of prayer. . .
Barbara Grizzuti HarrisonOne 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 HarrisonNothing 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 HarrisonI 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 HarrisonGrief does not end and love does not die and nothing fills its graven place. With grace, pain is transmuted into the gold of wisdom and compassion and the lesser coin of muted sadness and resignation; but something leaden of it remains, to become the kernel arond which more pain accretes (a black pearl): one pain becomes every other pain ... unless one strips away, one by one, the layers of pain to get to the heart of the pain - and this causes more pain, pain so intense as to feel like evisceration.
Barbara Grizzuti HarrisonThe most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.
Barbara Grizzuti HarrisonItaly offers one the most priceless of all one's possessions - one's own soul.
Barbara Grizzuti HarrisonKindness 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