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All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

[On Werner Erhard, founder of est:] If I wanted a new belief system, I’d choose to believe in God – He’s been in business longer than Werner, and He has better music.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Belief Believe Music
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
Collecting is like sex; satisfaction renews and creates new appetites.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Appetite Satisfaction Sex
Great unhappiness is incompatible with the belief that it will ever end.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Belief Grief Unhappiness
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
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
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
truth … is the first casualty of tyranny.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Casualties First Truth
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.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Care Sports Water
The past can be tamed and controlled.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Controlled Past Tamed
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
Illness is regarded as a crime, and crime is regarded as illness.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Crime Illness Regard
All our loves are contained in all our other loves.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Contain Love Other
Porches are America’s lost rooms.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Country Lost Rooms
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
To sleep is an act of faith.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Act Faith Sleep
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
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
In memory Venice is always magic.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Magic Memories Venice
The past is a sorry country.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Country Past Sorry
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
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
Beware of people carrying ideas. Beware of ideas carrying people.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Carrying Ideas People
Women’s propensity to share confidences is universal. We confirm our reality by sharing.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Propensity Reality Share
What you desire you call into being.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Call Creativity Desire
Italians’ relationship to food is loving, informal, and gay.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Food Gay Informal Relationship