Barbara Grizzuti Harrison (September 14, 1934 = April 24, 2002) was born in Queens, New York City. Her parents were first-generation Americans; her grandparents were immigrants from Calabria in Southern Italy. The turmoil of her childhood would have a strong influence on her writing. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.
All is waiting and all is work; all is change and all is permanence.
All our loves are contained in all our other loves.
Belief in the absence of illusions is itself an illusion.
Belief sometimes precedes understanding; faith sometimes precedes scientific evidence.
Beware of people carrying ideas. Beware of ideas carrying people.
Children hold us hostage; they represent our commitment to the future.
Desire creates its own object.
Facts mean nothing to wounded feelings.
Fantasies are more than substitutes for unpleasant reality; they are also dress rehearsals, plans. All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.
Food is my drug of choice.
For the unfashionably bulgy, life is a series of small humiliations.
Great unhappiness is incompatible with the belief that it will ever end.
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.
I refuse to believe that trading recipes is silly. Tuna-fish casserole is at least as real as corporate stock.
If I wanted a new belief system, I'd choose to believe in God- He's been in business longer than Werner, and He has better music. (on Werner Erhard, founder of est)
Illness is regarded as a crime, and crime is regarded as illness.
In the face of evil, detachment is a dubious virtue.
Insanity is a lack of proportion.
It's perfectly possible to hate one's fat and to love one's body at the same time.
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.
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.
Love is the only game that is not called on account of darkness.
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.
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.
Porches are America's lost rooms.
Silence is the garment of light.
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.
The past can be tamed and controlled.
The past is a sorry country.
There are no inanimate objects.
There are no original ideas. There are only original people.
There are places one comes home to that one has never been to.
There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.
To live exhilaratingly in and for the moment is deadly serious work, fun of the most exhausting sort.
To sleep is an act of faith.
Unhappiness makes beggars or accountants of us all.
Violence is its own anesthetist. The numbness it induces feels very much like calm.
Weather creates character.
What you desire you call into being.
Categories: Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, Quotes of the day
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