Illness is regarded as a crime, and crime is regarded as illness.
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
-
-
All our loves are contained in all our other loves.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON -
Italians’ relationship to food is loving, informal, and gay.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON -
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 perfectly possible to hate one’s fat and to love one’s body at the same time.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON -
Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON -
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 -
Violence is its own anesthetist. The numbness it induces feels very much like calm.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON -
Italians do not regard food as merely fuel. They regard it as medicine for the soul, one of life’s abiding pleasures.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON -
I don’t think I know a single woman who knows what she looks like.
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.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON -
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 -
All is waiting and all is work; all is change and all is permanence.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON -
The most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON -
Women’s propensity to share confidences is universal. We confirm our reality by sharing.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON -
Desire creates its own object.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON






