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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

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
One feels a quickening of the pulse when one crosses a border.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Borders Pulse Travel
Belief sometimes precedes understanding; faith sometimes precedes scientific evidence.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Belief Faith Understanding
Illness is regarded as a crime, and crime is regarded as illness.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Crime Illness Regard
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
My mother was my first jealous lover.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

First Jealous Mother
Silence is the garment of light.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Garments Light Silence
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

Lesson Matter Rome
Beware of people carrying ideas. Beware of ideas carrying people.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Carrying Ideas People
I love cloisters, which are the architectural equivalent of a theological concept: perfect freedom within set boundaries.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Architecture Boundaries Perfect
Every house we have lived in, every building to which our hands have lent their work, belongs to us by virtue of love or of regret.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Hands Home Regret
All is waiting and all is work; all is change and all is permanence.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Change Permanence Waiting Work
the islands of Italy combine all the elements – fire, water, earth, and air – and that is irresistible.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Air Fire Islands
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
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