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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

My mother was my first jealous lover.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

First Jealous Mother
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
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
The past is a sorry country.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Country Past Sorry
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
Italians’ relationship to food is loving, informal, and gay.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Food Gay Informal Relationship
All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Creativity Ideas Success
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
In the face of evil, detachment is a dubious virtue.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Dubious Evil Faces
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
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
Collecting is like sex; satisfaction renews and creates new appetites.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Appetite Satisfaction Sex
I love cloisters, which are the architectural equivalent of a theological concept: perfect freedom within set boundaries.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Architecture Boundaries Perfect
All our loves are contained in all our other loves.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Contain Love Other
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