Barbara Grizzuti Harrison Quotes - Page 2

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

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.

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

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.

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

The best work is a fusion of love and praise.

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

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.

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

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.

Belief sometimes precedes understanding; faith sometimes precedes scientific evidence.

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

the gardens of our childhood are all beautiful.

Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.

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

Weather creates character.

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.

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 past is a sorry country.

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

The past can be tamed and controlled.

All our loves are contained in all our other loves.

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

Unhappiness makes beggars or accountants of us all.