Barbara Grizzuti Harrison Quotes

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?

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.

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).

the gardens of our childhood are all beautiful.

The most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.

Porches are America’s lost rooms.

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.

I love cloisters, which are the architectural equivalent of a theological concept: perfect freedom within set boundaries.

Italians’ relationship to food is loving, informal, and gay.

Food is my drug of choice.