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.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISONThere is something worse than dying, and that is humiliation – at least so it seemed to me.
More Barbara Grizzuti Harrison Quotes
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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.
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Violence is its own anesthetist. The numbness it induces feels very much like calm.
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to have a crisis, and act upon it, is one thing. To dwell in perpetual crisis is another.
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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.
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Fantasies are more than substitutes for unpleasant reality; they are also dress rehearsals, plans. All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.
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If there is one lesson Rome teaches, it is that matter is good; in Rome the holy and the homely rise and converge.
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All our loves are contained in all our other loves.
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There are no inanimate objects.
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All is waiting and all is work; all is change and all is permanence.
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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.
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the islands of Italy combine all the elements – fire, water, earth, and air – and that is irresistible.
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Collecting is like sex; satisfaction renews and creates new appetites.
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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.
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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.
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Silence is the garment of light.
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One feels a quickening of the pulse when one crosses a border.
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Rome is all things high and low. It is like God, it accommodates so much.
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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.
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In the face of evil, detachment is a dubious virtue.
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Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.
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Great unhappiness is incompatible with the belief that it will ever end.
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Women’s propensity to share confidences is universal. We confirm our reality by sharing.
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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.
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Beware of people carrying ideas. Beware of ideas carrying people.
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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.
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Porches are America’s lost rooms.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON