Orsay Museum Quotes

The problem is that you are too much in love. You are here because your parents mentioned your name to someone who mentioned your parents' name to someone who mentioned your name to my superior who suggested that I might find a position for you. And so here you sit blocking my light and dripping on my floor, eager to tell me that you love the paintings in my museum. That you have known them, admired them, dreamt of them since you were a little girl. I wish it were otherwise but all this means nothing to me. Everyone who has sat on that stool has claimed your devotion. ~ C.S. Richardson

It came to me then that we're each something of a constant gardener of a million forgotten galaxies, a librarian of lost places and times, a curator of a museum of random details that really only matter to each of us. ~ Jonathan Riggs

Sometimes Partridge imagines that this isn't real, that, instead, it's just some elaborate reenactment of destruction, not the actual destruction itself. He remembers once being in a museum on a class trip. There were miniature displays with live actors in various wings, talking about what things were like before the Return of Civility. Each display was dedicated to a theme: before the impressive prison system was built, before difficult children were properly medicated, when feminism didn't encourage femininity, when the media was hostile to government instead of working toward a greater good, before people with dangerous ideas were properly identified, back when government had to ask permission to protect its good citizens from the evils of the world and from the evils among us, before the gates had gone up around neighborhoods with buzzer systems and friendly men at gatehouses who knew everyone by name.

In the heat of the day, there were battle reenactments on the museum's wide lawn that showed the uprisings waged in certain cities against the Return of Civility and its legislation. With the military behind the government, the uprisings - usually political demonstrations that became violent - were easily tamped down. The government's domestic militia, the Righteous Red Wave, came to save the day. The recorded sounds were deafening, Uzis and attack sirens pouring from speakers. The kids in his class bought bullhorns, very realistic hand grenades, and Righteous R ~ Julianna Baggott

Takes a special kind to go
another kind to stay here

........

Nowhere do such patriots so embrace
the leaving of the place ~ Kate Tough

Big Yellow Taxi

They paved paradise
Put up a parking lot
With a pink hotel, a boutique
And a swinging hot spot

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got till it's gone?
They paved paradise
Put up a parking lot

They took all the trees
Put 'em in a tree museum
And they charged the people
A dollar and a half just to see 'em

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got till it's gone?
They paved paradise
Put up a parking lot

Hey farmer, farmer
Put away the DDT now
Give me spots on my apples
But leave me the birds and the bees, please

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got till it's gone?
They paved paradise
Put up a parking lot

Late last night
I heard the screen door slam
And a big yellow taxi
Took away my old man

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got till it's gone?
They paved paradise
Put up a parking lot

I said, "Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got till it's gone?
They paved paradise
Put up a parking lot"

They paved paradise
Put up a parking lot
They paved paradise
Put up a parking lot ~ Joni Mitchell

I take the museum space also as sacred in a sense. ~ Tadao Ando

One of the first things that greet your eye in Rouen is the beautiful monument erected to Flaubert in the very wall of the Museum, which is Rouen's holy of holies. Just across from him, in front of a dense cluster of sycamores, is his friend and pupil Guy de Maupassant. The Maupassant statue at rouen is, I think, quite as impressive as that in Paris - perhaps more so - and it is even more happily placed. Besides there is something very fitting in the idea of commemorating together the master and the pupil who surpassed him. ~ Willa Cather

If you were to go to the National Museum in Addis Ababa, you would walk into a huge room filled with literally tens of tons of fossils, and most of them would be elephants and rhinos and hippopotamus and monkeys and giraffes and antelopes and so on. Hominids are very rare in the landscape, and it's very rare to find them. ~ Donald Johanson

You're innocent, Casaubon. You ran away instead of throwing stones, you got your degree, you didn't shoot anybody. Yet a few years ago I felt you, too, were blackmailing me. Nothing personal, just generational cycles. And then last year, when I saw the Pendulum, I understood everything."

"Everything?"

"Almost everything. You see, Casaubon, even the Pendulum is a false prophet. You look at it, you think it's the only fixed point in the cosmos. but if you detach it from the ceiling of the Conservatoire and hang it in a brothel, it works just the same. And there are other pendulums: there's one in New York, in the UN building, there's one in the science museum in San Francisco, and God knows how many others. Wherever you put it, Foucault's Pendulum swings from a motionless point while the earth rotates beneath it. Every point of the universe is a fixed point: all you have to do is hang the Pendulum from it."

"God is everywhere."

"In a sense, yes. That's why the Pendulum disturbs me. It promises the infinite, but where to put the infinite is left to me. So it isn't enough to worship the Pendulum; you still have to make a decision, you have to find the best point for it. And yet..."

"And yet?"

"And yet... You're not taking me seriously by any chance, are you, Casaubon? No, I can rest easy; we're not the type to take things seriously.... Well, as I was saying, the feeling you have is that you've spent a lifetime hang ~ Umberto Eco

The fifty-six hours of weekend that rolled out before us seemed endless. At sunrise we planned to declare ourselves the rightful inheritors of everything in the departmental refrigerator, but beyond that we had nothing scheduled. Maybe we would pick the lock to the machine shop and gawk at the huge saws, drills, and welding tools, treating it as our own personal museum. Maybe we would stage a private showing of The Seventh Seal using the projection system in the main auditorium. And maybe there was someone somewhere in the world who was happier than I was during that year, but on nights like that I certainly couldn't imagine it. ~ Hope Jahren

I love museums more than any other institution the human race has invented. Museum people are always overworked and underpaid, and they all deserve sainthood, every one. ~ Robert T. Bakker

Avicenna California ... Museum of my twisted youth, vault of my dearest and most disgusting memories. ~ Peter S. Beagle

Eco sees the intellectual as an organizer of culture, someone who can run a magazine or a museum. An administrator, in fact. I think this is a melancholy situation for an intellectual. ~ Antonio Tabucchi

You interest me very much, Mr. Holmes. I had hardly expected so dolichocephalic a skull or such well-marked supra-orbital development. Would you have any objection to my running my finger along your parietal fissure? A cast of your skull, sir, until the original is available, would be an ornament to any anthropological museum. It is not my intention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your skull." Sherlock ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

We who are white men can't change who we are. But we could do worse than to follow what I took that summer as his example: to be aware of and curious about the world around you, to give what you have with neither apology nor self-congratulation. When praise comes to see you, get out on the fire escape. When it's someone else's time to talk, listen. Don't turn your house into a museum. When your work is done, get out of the way. ~ John Hodgman

My most famous show is the 'Kitchen Show.' More famous than any gallery show or museum show I curated. ~ Hans Ulrich Obrist

I started to turn toward the closest bus stop. Alex turned the other way. "Suivez-moi," he commanded. So I followed. "Bon.Je pensais que nous irions-"
"Alex."
He stopped. "Ella."
"Don't do that, the immersion thing."
"Mais, c'est tres important."
"Alex."
"Ella."
"Please.I know you do this with other linguistic losers, but it makes me feel like I should have a great big L lipsticked onto my forehead in some swirly French calligraphy."
"Do you often contemplate decorating yourself in such a manner?"
I took a quick look down.I was wearing Sienna's turtleneck again, but my own jeans. There was a large blue sea horse from the art museum fountain running from my knee to the crease of my thigh. "Yeah," I admitted. "I do."
"Quelle horreur!" he declared, eyes round in mock distress.
"Casse-toi."
He let out a bark of laughter that sounded just like a seal. "Tres bien, Mademoiselle Marino. Got any more?"
"A couple.Frankie gave me a copy of How to Offend the French when I managed to get a B in 1B last year."
"Well,I never trade insults on a first date. Not that kinda guy. But after two or three..."
I liked that he'd said "date," instead of "tutoring session." Even if it wasn't and he totally didn't mean it. I couldn't help it. ~ Melissa Jensen

The Metropolitan Museum has all of our collections online, all our scholarly publications and catalogues since 1965. We have online features like the timeline of art history. ~ Thomas P. Campbell

The acquisition of culture requires repose, sitting quietly in a room with a book, or alone with one's thoughts even any crowded concert or art museum. ~ Joseph Epstein

What I like so much about Corot is that he can say everything with a bit of tree; and it was Corot himself that I found in the museum of Naples - in the simplicity of the work of Pompeii and the Egyptians. These priestesses in their silver-grey tunics are just like Corot's nymphs. ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Some people's merit badges are their names on libraries, museum, and universities" -Rydr ~ Paul Mosier

Most of the other visitors were chained to their audio guides, looking only at what their little headsets told them was worth seeing. ~ Dara Horn

Life is your art. An open, aware heart is your camera. A oneness with your world is your film. Your bright eyes and easy smile is your museum. ~ Ansel Adams

Greetings, conversationalists across the fruited plain, this is Rush Limbaugh, the most dangerous man in America, with the largest hypothalamus in North America, serving humanity simply by opening my mouth, destined for my own wing in the Museum of Broadcasting, executing everything I do flawlessly with zero mistakes, doing this show with half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair because I have talent on loan from ... God. Rush Limbaugh. A man. A legend. A way of life. ~ Rush Limbaugh

Yesterday I visited the British Museum; an exceedingly tiresome affair. It quite crushes a person to see so much at once; and I wandered from hall to hall with a weary and heavy heart. The present is burdened too much with the past. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

As an old-time small-town merchant, I can tell you that nobody has more love for the heyday of the smalltown retailing era than I do. That's one of the reasons we chose to put our little Wal-Mart museum on the square in Bentonville. It's in the old Walton's Five and Dime building, and it tries to capture a little bit of the old dime store feel. But I can also tell you this: if we had gotten smug about our early success, and said, "Well, we're the best merchant in town," and just kept doing everything exactly the way we were doing it, somebody else would have come along and given our customers what they wanted, and we would be out of business today. ~ Sam Walton

At a certain point, I stopped seeing my clothing worn by people on the streets ... It seemed like they were being treated as museum items. ~ Yohji Yamamoto

The extent to which perception and, consequently, vision are dependent upon memory and imagination is a matter of every day experience. We see familiar things more clearly then when we see objects about which we have no stock of memories. The old seamstress, who cannot read without glasses, can see to thread needle with the naked eye. Why? Because she is more familiar with needles then with print. In man who can work all day at the office without undue fatigue of the eyes is worn out by an hour at the museum and comes home with a splitting headache. Why? Because in the office he is following a regular routine and looking at words and figures, the bike of which he looks at every day; whereas in the museum everything is strange novel, and outlandish. ~ Aldous Huxley

There's a thing at the Museum of Natural History in New York, where I live: they have a stairwell where you follow the beginning and the course of this planet, and it's a very long stairwell, and you follow, and you follow, and then you reach the top, and we're, like, half a step on the stairwell - the timeline for us on this planet. ~ Peter Dinklage

While about one-third of Americans believe in ghosts, you won't find many exhibits on these spooky beings down at the local science museum. Why? Well, one explanation that you might consider, ghosts are just figments of our highly fertile imaginations! ~ Seth Shostak

We sit inert, like dead specimens of some museum, while lessons are pelted at us from on high, like hailstones on flowers. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

Lefty had seen Desdemona undress many times, but usually as no more than a shadow and never in moonlight. She had never curled onto her back like this, lifting her feet to take off her shoes. He watched and, as she pulled down her skirt and lifted her tunic, was struck by how different his sister looked, in moonlight, in a lifeboat. She glowed. She gave off white light. He blinked behind his hands. The moonlight kept rising; it covered his neck, it reached his eyes until he understood: Desdemona was wearing a corset. That was the other thing she'd brought along: the white cloth enfolding her silkworm eggs was nothing other than Desdemona's wedding corset. She thought she'd never wear it, but here it was. Brassiere cups pointed up at the canvas roof. Whalebone slats squeezed her waist. The corset's skirt dropped garters attached to nothing because my grandmother owned no stockings. In the lifeboat, the corset absorbed all available moonlight, with the odd result that Desdemona's face, head, and arms disappeared. She looked like Winged Victory, tumbled on her back, being carted off to a conqueror's museum. All that was missing was the wings. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides