Top 72 Quotes & Sayings by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

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

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

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

Desire creates its own object.

I refuse to believe that trading recipes is silly. Tuna Fish casserole is at least as real as corporate stock.

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.

Belief in the absence of illusions is itself an illusion.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

[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.

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 best work is a fusion of love and praise.

All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.

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.

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.

The dream police will not let me have sexual fantasies.

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.

There are no inanimate objects.

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

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

What you desire you call into being.

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

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

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

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

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

Insanity is a lack of proportion.

truth ... is the first casualty of tyranny.

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

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.

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

To sleep is an act of faith.

the gardens of our childhood are all beautiful.

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.

Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are all proprietary toward cities we love. 'Ah, you should have seen her when I loved her!' we say, reciting glories since faded or defiled, trusting her to no one else; that others should know and love her in her present fallen state (for she must fall without our vigilant love) is a species of betrayal.

Porches are America's lost rooms.

Food is my drug of choice.

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

Belief sometimes precedes understanding; faith sometimes precedes scientific evidence.

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.

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).

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 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.

My mother was my first jealous lover.

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

Facts mean nothing to wounded feelings.

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

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.

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