In the face of evil, detachment is a dubious virtue.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISONOne 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.
More Barbara Grizzuti Harrison Quotes
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The past is a sorry country.
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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 is waiting and all is work; all is change and all is permanence.
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In memory Venice is always magic.
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I don’t think I know a single woman who knows what she looks like.
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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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Sometimes I think that just not thinking of oneself is a form of prayer. . .
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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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All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.
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Children hold us hostage; they represent our commitment to the future.
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There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.
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Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.
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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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There are no original ideas. There are only original people.
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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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Insanity is a lack of proportion.
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Violence is its own anesthetist. The numbness it induces feels very much like calm.
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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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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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to have a crisis, and act upon it, is one thing. To dwell in perpetual crisis is another.
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My mother was my first jealous lover.
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The best work is a fusion of love and praise.
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Rome is all things high and low. It is like God, it accommodates so much.
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Every generation reinvents the wheel – and in the process it often adds to rather than subtracts from a woman’s burdens.
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Unhappiness makes beggars or accountants of us all.
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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.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON