Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISONTo 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.
More Barbara Grizzuti Harrison Quotes
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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 -
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.
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Beware of people carrying ideas. Beware of ideas carrying people.
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Great unhappiness is incompatible with the belief that it will ever end.
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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?
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Fantasies are more than substitutes for unpleasant reality; they are also dress rehearsals, plans. All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.
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The most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.
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To live exhilaratingly in and for the moment is deadly serious work, fun of the most exhausting sort
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Italy offers one the most priceless of all one’s possessions – one’s own soul.
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Sometimes I think that just not thinking of oneself is a form of prayer. . .
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Italians do not regard food as merely fuel. They regard it as medicine for the soul, one of life’s abiding pleasures.
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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.
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to have a crisis, and act upon it, is one thing. To dwell in perpetual crisis is another.
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Illness is regarded as a crime, and crime is regarded as illness.
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I don’t think I know a single woman who knows what she looks like.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON