Barbara Grizzuti Harrison Quotes

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

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.

Facts mean nothing to wounded feelings.

All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.

truth ... is the first casualty of tyranny.

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.

Porches are America's lost rooms.

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.

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

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

Food is my drug of choice.

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

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.

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

What you desire you call into being.

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

Desire creates its own object.

To sleep is an act of faith.

Silence is the garment of light.

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

Insanity is a lack of proportion.

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

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.

[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.

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