Barbara Quotes
Throughout history, self-styled arbiters have taken it upon themselves to decide the question of what can or cannot be the legitimate purview of art.
Every generation reinvents the wheel - and in the process it often adds to rather than subtracts from a woman's burdens.
to have a crisis, and act upon it, is one thing. To dwell in perpetual crisis is another.
I love cloisters, which are the architectural equivalent of a theological concept: perfect freedom within set boundaries.
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.
Sometimes I think that just not thinking of oneself is a form of prayer. . .
Belief sometimes precedes understanding; faith sometimes precedes scientific evidence.
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.
Every house we have lived in, every building to which our hands have lent their work, belongs to us by virtue of love or of regret.
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?
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.
Violence is its own anesthetist. The numbness it induces feels very much like calm.
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).
the islands of Italy combine all the elements - fire, water, earth, and air - and that is irresistible.
If there is one lesson Rome teaches, it is that matter is good; in Rome the holy and the homely rise and converge.
Italy offers one the most priceless of all one's possessions - one's own soul.
Italians do not regard food as merely fuel. They regard it as medicine for the soul, one of life's abiding pleasures.
it's perfectly possible to hate one's fat and to love one's body at the same time.
We love people differently at different stages of our knowledge of them. As love changes its hape and its nature, we have to decide what we're going to do about that love on any given day.
As Cinderella would probably tell you, even a prince who only recognizes your footwear is preferable to a lifetime of cleaning grates.
One shouldn't allow oneself to be intimidated by something that can be picked up and tucked under one's arm.
Travel is something that I like to do because it gives you lots of images, and it also really makes you think about your own place in the world in a very different way.
I've been writing fiction as long as I've been writing poetry. It's just that the poetry took off, and it took me a lot longer to figure out how to write a story.
I think it's really hard to be joyful. I work hard at it. I always feel like it's a choice. You can be joyful or you can be depressed, and there just doesn't seem to be any future in depression.
