Best 53 quotes of Barbara Grizzuti Harrison on MyQuotes

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

All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.

Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.

Belief sometimes precedes understanding; faith sometimes precedes scientific evidence.

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

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

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

Facts mean nothing to wounded feelings.

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

Food is my drug of choice.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

In memory Venice is always magic.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

My mother was my first jealous lover.

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.

Porches are America's lost rooms.

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.

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

[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.

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.

Silence is the garment of light.

The best work is a fusion of love and praise.

the gardens of our childhood are all beautiful.

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

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

The past can be tamed and controlled.

The past is a sorry country.

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 are no original ideas. There are only original people.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

To sleep is an act of faith.

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.

truth ... is the first casualty of tyranny.