Barbara Grizzuti Harrison Quotes

Belief sometimes precedes understanding; faith sometimes precedes scientific evidence.

What you desire you call into being.

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

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

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

The past can be tamed and controlled.

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

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.

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

[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.

Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.

Illness is regarded as a crime, and crime is regarded as illness.

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.

the gardens of our childhood are all beautiful.

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.

truth ... is the first casualty of tyranny.

Fantasies are more than substitutes for unpleasant reality; they are also dress rehearsals, plans. All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.

All is waiting and all is work; all is change and all is permanence.

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

All our loves are contained in all our other loves.

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.

Beware of people carrying ideas. Beware of ideas carrying people.

Weather creates character.

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?

There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.

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.

There are no original ideas. There are only original people.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Grief 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.

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

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

Unhappiness makes beggars or accountants of us all.

Insanity is a lack of proportion.

In memory Venice is always magic.

Silence is the garment of light.

The past is a sorry country.

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.

All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.

The dream police will not let me have sexual fantasies.

In the face of evil, detachment is a dubious virtue.

Porches are America's lost rooms.

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

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