Top 50 Barbara Grizzuti Harrison Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Food is my drug of choice.”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

2. “All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

3. “To live exhilaratingly in and for the moment is deadly serious work, fun of the most exhausting sort.”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Featured in: Fun Quotes

4. “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

5. “There are no original ideas. There are only original people.”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

6. “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

Featured in: Romance Quotes

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

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

8. “Insanity is a lack of proportion.”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

9. “The dream police will not let me have sexual fantasies.”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

10. “Beware of people carrying ideas. Beware of ideas carrying people.”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

11. “In memory Venice is always magic.”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

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

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

13. “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

14. “The best work is a fusion of love and praise.”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

15. “Porches are America’s lost rooms.”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

16. “There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

17. “Silence is the garment of light.”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

18. “Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

19. “There is something worse than dying, and that is humiliation – at least so it seemed to me...”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

20. “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

21. “My mother was my first jealous lover...”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

22. “There are places one comes home to that one has never been to...”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

23. “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

24. “In the face of evil, detachment is a dubious virtue.”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

25. “One 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.”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

26. “Italy offers one the most priceless of all one’s possessions – one’s own soul.”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

27. “Children hold us hostage; they represent our commitment to the future.”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

28. “Facts mean nothing to wounded feelings...”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

29. “Belief sometimes precedes understanding; faith sometimes precedes scientific evidence.”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

30. “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

31. “Weather creates character.”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

32. “The past can be tamed and controlled.”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

33. “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

34. “Great unhappiness is incompatible with the belief that it will ever end.”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

35. “Desire creates its own object.”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

36. “Unhappiness makes beggars or accountants of us all.”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

37. “Women’s propensity to share confidences is universal. We confirm our reality by sharing.”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

38. “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

39. “Rome is all things high and low. It is like God, it accommodates so much.”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

40. “Every generation reinvents the wheel – and in the process it often adds to rather than subtracts from a woman’s burdens.”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

41. “Persecution always acts as a jell for members of cults; it proves to them, in the absence of history, liturgy, tradition, and doctrine, that they are God’s chosen.”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

42. “What you desire you call into being...”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

43. “One feels a quickening of the pulse when one crosses a border.”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

44. “Violence is its own anesthetist. The numbness it induces feels very much like calm.”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

45. “I don’t think I know a single woman who knows what she looks like.”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

46. “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.”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

47. “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

48. “The past is a sorry country.”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

49. “All is waiting and all is work; all is change and all is permanence.”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

50. “All our loves are contained in all our other loves.”

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison