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

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

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

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

Art Inspirational Reality
My mother was my first jealous lover.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

First Jealous Mother
Collecting is like sex; satisfaction renews and creates new appetites.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Appetite Satisfaction Sex
Italy offers one the most priceless of all one’s possessions – one’s own soul.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Possession Priceless Soul
The past is a sorry country.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Country Past Sorry
Women’s propensity to share confidences is universal. We confirm our reality by sharing.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Propensity Reality Share
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 HARRISON

Artist Husband Movement
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.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Airplane Thinking Weight
All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Creativity Ideas Success
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.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Dream Quality 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).
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Bears Face Water
Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Artistic Autobiography Strikes
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.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Rome Tired Wish
Italians do not regard food as merely fuel. They regard it as medicine for the soul, one of life’s abiding pleasures.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Abiding Medicine Soul
Rome is all things high and low. It is like God, it accommodates so much.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

All Lows Rome Things