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.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISONThe past can be tamed and controlled.
More Barbara Grizzuti Harrison Quotes
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In the face of evil, detachment is a dubious virtue.
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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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To sleep is an act of faith.
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Children hold us hostage; they represent our commitment to the future.
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Sometimes I think that just not thinking of oneself is a form of prayer. . .
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Violence is its own anesthetist. The numbness it induces feels very much like calm.
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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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I love cloisters, which are the architectural equivalent of a theological concept: perfect freedom within set boundaries.
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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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To live exhilaratingly in and for the moment is deadly serious work, fun of the most exhausting sort
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The most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.
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Rome is all things high and low. It is like God, it accommodates so much.
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There is something worse than dying, and that is humiliation – at least so it seemed to me.
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The past can be tamed and controlled.
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Italians’ relationship to food is loving, informal, and gay.
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The best work is a fusion of love and praise.
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Weather creates character.
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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).
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Italians do not regard food as merely fuel. They regard it as medicine for the soul, one of life’s abiding pleasures.
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it’s perfectly possible to hate one’s fat and to love one’s body at the same time.
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Illness is regarded as a crime, and crime is regarded as illness.
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All is waiting and all is work; all is change and all is permanence.
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There are places one comes home to that one has never been to.
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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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Collecting is like sex; satisfaction renews and creates new appetites.
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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.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON