Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
Barbara Grizzuti Harrisonwas an American journalist, essayist and memoirist. She is best known for her autobiographical work, particularly her account of growing up as one of Jehovah's Witnesses, and for her travel writing...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth14 September 1934
CountryUnited States of America
mistake past thinking
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.
past tamed controlled
The past can be tamed and controlled.
grief belief unhappiness
Great unhappiness is incompatible with the belief that it will ever end.
gay
Italians' relationship to food is loving, informal, and gay ...
soul priceless possession
Italy offers one the most priceless of all one's possessions - one's own soul.
air fire islands
the islands of Italy combine all the elements - fire, water, earth, and air - and that is irresistible.
illness crime
illness is regarded as a crime, and crime is regarded as illness ...
pain grief heart
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.
way pitfalls danger
There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.
struggle evil choices
The most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.
stress trouble crisis
to have a crisis, and act upon it, is one thing. To dwell in perpetual crisis is another.
unhappiness accountants beggar
Unhappiness makes beggars or accountants of us all.
water faces bears
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).
sports water care
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.