Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
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.Collection: Future
Fantasies are more than substitutes for unpleasant reality; they are also dress rehearsals, plans. All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.Collection: Imagination
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.Collection: Intelligence
Belief in the absence of illusions is itself an illusion.
The most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.
There are no original ideas. There are only original people.
Beware of people carrying ideas. Beware of ideas carrying people.
Desire creates its own object.
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.
I refuse to believe that trading recipes is silly. Tuna Fish casserole is at least as real as corporate stock.
Facts mean nothing to wounded feelings.Collection: Mean
All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.Collection: Success
truth ... is the first casualty of tyranny.Collection: Truth
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.Collection: Doctrine
Porches are America's lost rooms.Collection: America
Food is my drug of choice.Collection: Food
There are places one comes home to that one has never been to.Collection: Travel
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.Collection: Pain
Every generation reinvents the wheel - and in the process it often adds to rather than subtracts from a woman's burdens.Collection: Add
Great unhappiness is incompatible with the belief that it will ever end.Collection: Grief
What you desire you call into being.Collection: Creativity
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.Collection: Travel
To sleep is an act of faith.Collection: Sleep
Silence is the garment of light.Collection: Light
Insanity is a lack of proportion.Collection: Insanity
to have a crisis, and act upon it, is one thing. To dwell in perpetual crisis is another.Collection: Stress
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.Collection: Sports
Rome is all things high and low. It is like God, it accommodates so much.Collection: Rome
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.Collection: Betrayal
it's perfectly possible to hate one's fat and to love one's body at the same time.Collection: Hate
Children hold us hostage; they represent our commitment to the future.Collection: Children
Collecting is like sex; satisfaction renews and creates new appetites.Collection: Sex
The dream police will not let me have sexual fantasies.Collection: Dream
In the face of evil, detachment is a dubious virtue.Collection: Evil
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.Collection: Regret
There are no inanimate objects.Collection: Inanimate Objects
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.Collection: Dream
If there is one lesson Rome teaches, it is that matter is good; in Rome the holy and the homely rise and converge.Collection: Rome
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.Collection: Tired
the islands of Italy combine all the elements - fire, water, earth, and air - and that is irresistible.Collection: Fire
Violence is its own anesthetist. The numbness it induces feels very much like calm.Collection: Numbness
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.Collection: Sports
The past can be tamed and controlled.Collection: Past
One feels a quickening of the pulse when one crosses a border.Collection: Travel
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?Collection: Falling In Love
The past is a sorry country.Collection: Country
All our loves are contained in all our other loves.Collection: Our Love
[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.Collection: Believe
There is something worse than dying, and that is humiliation - at least so it seemed to me.Collection: Dying