the museums QUOTES

1 " They ran to the museums for paintings. I ran to the roof for sunsets "

2 " Provided we can escape from the museums we carry around inside us, provided we can stop selling ourselves tickets to the galleries in our own skulls, we can begin to contemplate an art which re-creates the goal of the sorcerer: changing the structure of reality by the manipulation of living symbols ... Art tells gorgeous lies that come true. "

― Hakim Bey , TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone (New Autonomy)

3 " I spent an hour looking at pots and carpets in the museums the other day, until the desire to describe them became like the desire for the lusts of the flesh. "

― Virginia Woolf , The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Two, 1912-1922

4 " We are not on this earth to just stand still & look pretty. The museums already have enough statues. "

― Mandy Hale , The Single Woman: Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass

5 " Yes, and our sister's sons are candid now about a creepy business which used to worry them a lot: They cannot find their mother or their father in their memories anywhere - not anywhere. The goat farmer, whose name is James Carmalt Adams, Jr., said this about it to me, tapping his forehead with his fingertips: " It isn't the museum, it should be." The museums in children's minds, I think, automatically empty themselves in times of utmost horror - to protect the children from eternal grief. "

6 " In the museums we used to visit on family vacations when I was a kid, I used to love those rooms which displayed collections of minerals in a kind of closet or chamber which would, at the push of a button, darken. Then ultraviolet lights would begin to glow and the minerals would seem to come alive, new colors, new possibilities, and architectures revealed. Plain stones became fantastic, “futuristic…” Of course there wasn’t any black light in the center of the earth, in the caves where they were quarried; how strange that these stones should have to be brought here, bathed with this unnatural light in order for their transcendent characters to emerge. Irradiation revealed a secret aspect of the world.
Imagine illness as this light; demanding, torturous, punitive, it nonetheless reveals more of what things are. A certain glow of being appears. I think this is what is meant when we speculate that death is what makes love possible. "

― Mark Doty , Heaven's Coast: A Memoir

7 " He would not now conduct little Nell to the coast; he would not convey her by a steamer to Port Said, would not surrender her to Mr. Rawlinson; he himself would not fall into his father's arms and would not hear from his lips that he had acted like a true Pole! The end, the end! In a few days the sun would shine only upon the lifeless bodies and afterwards would dry them up into a semblance of those mummies which slumber in an eternal sleep in the museums in Egypt "

― Henryk Sienkiewicz , In Desert and Wilderness

8 " The ring which you are holding, my friend, is identical to that one. I had it cut according to the model of the king's ring, and damascened in Spain. The original is still in the Escorial; it would have been pleasant to steal it, for I easily acquire the instincts of a thief when I am in a museum, and I always find objects which have a history - especially a tragic history - uniquely attractive. I am not an Englishman for nothing - but that which is easily enough accomplished in France is not at all practical in Spain: the museums there are very secure. "

― Jean Lorrain , Monsieur De Phocas