Barbara Grizzuti Harrison (1934–2002) was 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.
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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.
—Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
Topics: Revolution, Responsibility, Revolutionaries, Revolutions
There are no original ideas. There are only original people.
—Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
Topics: Originality
The most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.
—Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
Belief in the absence of illusions is itself an illusion.
—Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
Topics: Illusion, Absence
Women’s propensity to share confidences is universal. We confirm our reality by sharing.
—Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
Topics: Secrets, Sharing
Beware of people carrying ideas. Beware of ideas carrying people.
—Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
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
Topics: Vision, Imagination, Forethought, Foresight, Fantasy
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.
—Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
Topics: Excuses
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
Topics: Relationships, Danger, Failure
To sleep is an act of faith.
—Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
Topics: Sleep
I refuse to believe that trading recipes is silly. Tuna fish casserole is at least as real as corporate stock.
—Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
Topics: Eating
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