Barbara Grizzuti Harrison Quotes

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

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

There is something worse than dying, and that is humiliation - at least so it seemed to me.

Desire creates its own object.

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).

The best work is a fusion of love and praise.

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.

My mother was my first jealous lover.

the islands of Italy combine all the elements - fire, water, earth, and air - and that is irresistible.

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

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

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

There are no inanimate objects.

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.

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

Facts mean nothing to wounded feelings.

To sleep is an act of faith.

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

Food is my drug of choice.

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