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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.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

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
To live exhilaratingly in and for the moment is deadly serious work, fun of the most exhausting sort
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Anarchy Fun Serious Work
Great unhappiness is incompatible with the belief that it will ever end.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Belief Grief Unhappiness
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.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Imagination Kindness Pitfalls
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?
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

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

Calm Numbness Violence
I love cloisters, which are the architectural equivalent of a theological concept: perfect freedom within set boundaries.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Architecture Boundaries Perfect
it’s perfectly possible to hate one’s fat and to love one’s body at the same time.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Body Hate Weight
Illness is regarded as a crime, and crime is regarded as illness.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Crime Illness Regard
Unhappiness makes beggars or accountants of us all.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Accountants Beggar Unhappiness
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 HARRISON

Cities Garden Travel
Italy offers one the most priceless of all one’s possessions – one’s own soul.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Possession Priceless Soul
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