Life & Wisdom Quote by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Harrison refuses to let fantasy stay in the juvenile box marked escapism. Her point is sharper: imagination isn’t a hiding place from reality, it’s reality’s staging area. By calling fantasies “dress rehearsals,” she borrows the language of theater to reframe inner life as preparation, not avoidance. A rehearsal is private but consequential; it’s where you learn your lines, test your nerves, discover what doesn’t work. That metaphor quietly redeems daydreaming from shame and turns it into a form of agency.

The subtext is a rebuke to a culture that treats “unpleasant reality” as the only honest material, and anything imagined as unserious. Harrison implies the opposite: refusing to imagine is its own capitulation. Plans don’t arrive from nowhere; they are fantasies with deadlines. Even so-called practical action is preceded by a mental prototype - the sentence you practice before you say it, the exit route you map before you leave, the version of yourself you try on before you become them.

Context matters here because Harrison wrote as a woman intellectual in an era that often trivialized women’s interiority as indulgent or hysterical. Elevating fantasy to the level of “plans” is a subtle political move: it validates private longing as the first draft of change. There’s also an ethical edge: if imagination is the origin point of “all acts,” then it’s not morally neutral. We rehearse cruelty, too. Harrison’s line isn’t airy inspiration; it’s a reminder that what we allow ourselves to envision is what we’re already practicing to make real.