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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?

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Children hold us hostage; they represent our commitment to the future.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Children Commitment Hostage
Great unhappiness is incompatible with the belief that it will ever end.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Belief Grief Unhappiness
The past can be tamed and controlled.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Controlled Past Tamed
Food is my drug of choice.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Choices Drug Food
Illness is regarded as a crime, and crime is regarded as illness.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Crime Illness Regard
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
Collecting is like sex; satisfaction renews and creates new appetites.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Appetite Satisfaction Sex
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
Weather creates character.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Character Create Weather
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.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Children Goodness Responsibility
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.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Sex Sports Water
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
There is something worse than dying, and that is humiliation – at least so it seemed to me.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Dying Embarrassment Humiliation
Sometimes I think that just not thinking of oneself is a form of prayer. . .
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Prayer Sometimes Thinking
Persecution always acts as a jell for members of cults; it proves to them, in the absence of history, liturgy, tradition, and doctrine, that they are God’s chosen.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Absence Doctrine Tradition
Desire creates its own object.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

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

Calm Numbness Violence
The most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Evil Pain Struggle
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
Every generation reinvents the wheel – and in the process it often adds to rather than subtracts from a woman’s burdens.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Act Add Generation Rehearsal Wheel
Facts mean nothing to wounded feelings.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Facts Feelings Mean
truth … is the first casualty of tyranny.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Casualties First Truth
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
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
My mother was my first jealous lover.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

First Jealous Mother
to have a crisis, and act upon it, is one thing. To dwell in perpetual crisis is another.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Crisis Stress Trouble
All is waiting and all is work; all is change and all is permanence.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Change Permanence Waiting Work