90 Quotes by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

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.

the islands of Italy combine all the elements - fire, water, earth, and air - and that is irresistible.

Insanity is a lack of proportion.

there are no inanimate objects ...

illness is regarded as a crime, and crime is regarded as illness ...

Every generation reinvents the wheel - and in the process it often adds to rather than subtracts from a woman's burdens.

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.

Grief does not end and love does not die and nothing fills its graven place. With grace, pain is transmuted into the gold of wisdom and compassion and the lesser coin of muted sadness and resignation; but something leaden of it remains, to become the kernel arond which more pain accretes (a black pearl): one pain becomes every other pain ... unless one strips away, one by one, the layers of pain to get to the heart of the pain - and this causes more pain, pain so intense as to feel like evisceration.

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