BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON

Desire creates its own object.

Belief in the absence of illusions is itself an illusion.

I refuse to believe that trading recipes is silly. Tuna Fish casserole is at least as real as corporate stock.

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

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.

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

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.

Women's propensity to share confidences is universal. We confirm our reality by sharing.

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

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

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.

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

If there is one lesson Rome teaches, it is that matter is good; in Rome the holy and the homely rise and converge.

Food is my drug of choice.

Collecting is like sex; satisfaction renews and creates new appetites.

The dream police will not let me have sexual fantasies.

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.

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

The real reason women fall in love abroad is not that they are free of domestic inhibitions but that they translate their love of stone and place into love of flesh. ... Is this true?

To offer the complexities of life as an excuse for not addressing oneself to the simpler, more manageable (trivial) aspects of daily existence is a perversity often indulged in by artists, husbands, intellectuals -- and critics of the Women's Movement.

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

In memory Venice is always magic.

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

Weather creates character.

Italians' relationship to food is loving, informal, and gay.