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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.

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

Dream Quality Romance
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
What you desire you call into being.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Call Creativity Desire
My mother was my first jealous lover.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

First Jealous Mother
There is something worse than dying, and that is humiliation – at least so it seemed to me.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Dying Embarrassment Humiliation
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
Rome is all things high and low. It is like God, it accommodates so much.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

All Lows Rome Things
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

Cities Garden Travel
All is waiting and all is work; all is change and all is permanence.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Change Permanence Waiting Work
Italy offers one the most priceless of all one’s possessions – one’s own soul.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Possession Priceless Soul
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
There are no original ideas. There are only original people.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Ideas Original People
All our loves are contained in all our other loves.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Contain Love Other
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
The past can be tamed and controlled.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Controlled Past Tamed
to have a crisis, and act upon it, is one thing. To dwell in perpetual crisis is another.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Crisis Stress Trouble
The most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Evil Pain Struggle
Women’s propensity to share confidences is universal. We confirm our reality by sharing.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Propensity Reality Share
Unhappiness makes beggars or accountants of us all.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Accountants Beggar Unhappiness
I made the mistake of thinking that if you add up the past, you sum up the future; I forgot how frequently life astonishes us.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Mistake Past Thinking
Great unhappiness is incompatible with the belief that it will ever end.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Belief Grief Unhappiness
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
The dream police will not let me have sexual fantasies.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Dream Fantasy Police
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
Porches are America’s lost rooms.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Country Lost Rooms
Italians’ relationship to food is loving, informal, and gay.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Food Gay Informal Relationship