In the face of evil, detachment is a dubious virtue.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISONAll acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.
More Barbara Grizzuti Harrison Quotes
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The real reason women fall in love abroad is not that they are free of domestic inhibitions but that they translate their love of stone and place into love of flesh. … Is this true?
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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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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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The best work is a fusion of love and praise.
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Illness is regarded as a crime, and crime is regarded as illness.
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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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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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I love cloisters, which are the architectural equivalent of a theological concept: perfect freedom within set boundaries.
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Violence is its own anesthetist. The numbness it induces feels very much like calm.
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Italy offers one the most priceless of all one’s possessions – one’s own soul.
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In memory Venice is always magic.
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Great unhappiness is incompatible with the belief that it will ever end.
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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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My mother was my first jealous lover.
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Children hold us hostage; they represent our commitment to the future.
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All our loves are contained in all our other loves.
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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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Rome is all things high and low. It is like God, it accommodates so much.
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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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Women’s propensity to share confidences is universal. We confirm our reality by sharing.
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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.
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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.
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What you desire you call into being.
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Food is my drug of choice.
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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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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