To live exhilaratingly in and for the moment is deadly serious work, fun of the most exhausting sort
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISONOne 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.
More Barbara Grizzuti Harrison Quotes
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it’s perfectly possible to hate one’s fat and to love one’s body at the same time.
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The dream police will not let me have sexual fantasies.
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I love cloisters, which are the architectural equivalent of a theological concept: perfect freedom within set boundaries.
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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.
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Italy offers one the most priceless of all one’s possessions – one’s own soul.
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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).
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the gardens of our childhood are all beautiful.
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Silence is the garment of light.
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Rome is all things high and low. It is like God, it accommodates so much.
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Beware of people carrying ideas. Beware of ideas carrying people.
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The best work is a fusion of love and praise.
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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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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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Our awesome responsibility to ourselves, to our children, and to the future is to create ourselves in the image of goodness, because the future depends on the nobility of our imaginings.
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The past is a sorry country.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON






