Quotes from Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Beware of people carrying ideas. Beware of ideas carrying people.

My mother was my first jealous lover.

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

[On Werner Erhard, founder of est:] 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.

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

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.

All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.

Fantasies are more than substitutes for unpleasant reality; they are also dress rehearsals, plans. All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.

Sometimes I think that just not thinking of oneself is a form of prayer. . .

to have a crisis, and act upon it, is one thing. To dwell in perpetual crisis is another.

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 made the mistake of thinking that if you add up the past, you sum up the future; I forgot how frequently life astonishes us.

Italians do not regard food as merely fuel. They regard it as medicine for the soul, one of life's abiding pleasures.

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.

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.

True revolutionaries are like God - they create the world in their own image. 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.

There are no original ideas. There are only original people.

Fantasies are more than substitutes for unpleasant reality; they are also dress rehearsals, plans. All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.

We are all proprietary toward cities we love. 'Ah, you should have seen her when I loved her!' we say, reciting glories since faded or defiled, trusting her to no one else; that others should know and love her in her present fallen state (for she must fall without our vigilant love) is a species of betrayal.

Yes, everything begins in the human heart. But the human heart is not vacuum-packed. The pulsebeat from any breast, however armored, is felt, not just in private contract-"doomed commitments"- between private persons, but in Selma, in Haight-Ashbury, in Vietnam, in South Africa, in East New York. Reports from those locations are also reports from the heart.

it's perfectly possible to hate one's fat and to love one's body at the same time.

The best work is a fusion of love and praise.

Belief in the absence of illusions is itself an illusion.

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