Plantijn Museum Quotes

I went to the beach a couple of times in New York City. Tough summer out there, but I was pretty excited. I found what I thought at the time was a very rare seashell. And I took it to a friend of mine who works in a museum. And I was really disappointed. It turned out to be just a human ear. ~ David Letterman

It seems more than a little patronizing for Westerners to lament the loss of the good old days when life in the Khumbu was so much simpler and more picturesque. Most of the people who live in this rugged country seem to have no desire to be severed from the modern world or the untidy flow of human progress. The last thing Sherpas want is to be preserved as specimens in an anthropological museum. ~ Jon Krakauer

The whole of language is a continuous process of metaphor, and the history of semantics is an aspect of the history of culture; language is at the same time a living thing and a museum of fossils of life and civilisations. ~ Antonio Gramsci

I visited the Museum of Modern Art and viewed the exhibition of Picasso's sculptures, and I couldn't help but think about what it would be like to have a room full of school children explore Picasso's approach to making art. ~ Jerry Pinkney

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

We had a great friendship, good sex, a shared passion for the dinosaur room at the Museum of Natural History and Haagen-Daz French Vanilla ice cream. But love is more than the sum of its parts, isn't it? ~ Lisa Unger

Standing on your own feet, naturally, is as tiresome and dangerous as standing your ground; and when the wild dogs begin to circle grinning round you with their dripping tongues hanging out and you know that with mock servility they like to go for your toes first, why, then, you should stand on someone else's feet, or head if necessary. It is a point of faith for me never to be Hitler; he stood his ground in his own two shoes in his own little hole almost to the end, the fool. But I may disguise myself as any other animate or inanimate object in what follows. I can be eight lame women with falsies, eight cracked chamber pots, or -- let's get right to the point -- a gladiator who is actually constructed of old clothes, brooms, and a paper plate with a face daubed on in finger-paints, not to mention two vagrants inside each shirt-sleeve and pant-leg, moving Goliath's limbs at my say-so; but as long as you believe in the gladiator, you are whipped, and the Museum people will set out on your track, and then once they catch you, don't think I won't come study your exhibit until I can convince your own sweetheart that I am you come back from the dead. For I am Big George, the eternal winner. ~ William T. Vollmann

The parts of graffiti I like are really antagonizing still - it's not something that a museum would really embrace. ~ Barry McGee

I'd love to open a private museum in Paris, London, or New York, but I don't have the money. If I were Bill Gates or Paul Allen, the first thing I would do is build a museum. ~ Jean Pigozzi

A living museum must surely see itself as a locus of argument. A breathing art institution is not a lockup but a moveable feast. ~ Andrew O'Hagan

In this privatized world, what sort of "cultural" conversation can there be? What can one of us possibly say to another about our experience except "Today I visited the museum of me, and I liked it. ~ Ellen Ullman

When in a museum, walk slowly but keep walking. ~ Gertrude Stein

The small amount of people that control the discourse around painting - I thought that the whole museum world was just a bunch of phonies, and I didn't really want to have anything to do with it. I guess I did installations, in a funny way, because they couldn't be commodified. ~ Fred Tomaselli

The thousand dresses, laid out so reverently that afternoon, flecks of dust brushed off carefully in doorways, hems gathered up for the carriage trip: where are they now? Is a single one museum-displayed? Are some few yet saved in attics? Most are dust. As are the women who wore them so proudly in that transient moment of radiance. ~ George Saunders

Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers's Centre Georges Pompidou of 1971-1977 - the true prototype of the modern museum as popular architectural spectacle - wound up costing so much more than planned that the French government solved the shortfall by cutting support for several regional museums. ~ Martin Filler

Almost the first thing you see after entering the Houdini exhibition at the Jewish Museum is a large-screen film of Harry Houdini hanging by his ankles upside-down from a tall building, high over a sea of men in fedoras, and thrashing his way out of a straitjacket. ~ Robert Gottlieb

Nothing in the next-door world of Dachau impinged on the great winter cycle of Beethoven chamber music played in Munich. No canvases came off museum walls as the butchers strolled reverently past, guide-books in hand. ~ George Steiner

[Photography was necessary to] make my place in the art-world: in order to do this, I had to make a picture, since a picture was what a gallery or museum was meant to hold (all the while, of course, I was claiming that I was denying the standard, rejecting it ... ) ~ Vito Acconci

Hodgkin had just returned from his second visit to Paris, where he had learned to prepare and dissect cadaveric specimens. He was promptly recruited to collect specimens for Guy's new museum. The job's most inventive academic perk, perhaps, was his new title: the Curator of the Museum and the Inspector of the Dead. Hodgkin ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Do you realize that you will not only wreck your civilization, such as it is, and kill most of your people; but that you will also poison the fish in your rivers, the squirrels in your trees, the flocks of birds, the soil, the water? There are times when you seem, to us, like apes loose in a museum, carrying knives, slashing the canvases, breaking the statuary with hammers. ~ Walter Tevis

Alberto Alessi had asked a dozen architects to design a sterling silver tea service - with a teapot, a coffee pot, sugar, creamer, a spoon, and a tray. Our brief was that it didn't matter if it didn't work and cost wasn't the issue. It was a promotional project, not a commercial enterprise, and was going to be showcased in museums. And the coffee and tea piazza, as mine was called, received a great response. It was wonderful to walk into the Whitney museum and see all these objects on the first floor. ~ Michael Graves

My position on how to address the Confederate flag is clear. In Florida, we acted, moving the flag from the state grounds to a museum, where it belonged. ~ Rick Santorum

The flowers that I left in the ground,
that I did not gather for you,
today I bring them all back,
to let them grow forever,
not in poems or marble,
but where they fell and rotted.

And the ships in their great stalls,
huge and transitory as heroes,
ships I could not captain,
today I bring them back
to let them sail forever,
not in model or ballad,
but where they were wrecked and scuttled.

And the child on whose shoulders I stand,
whose longing I purged
with public, kingly discipline,
today I bring him back
to languish forever,
not in confession or biography,
but where he flourished,
growing sly and hairy.

It is not malice that draws me away,
draws me to renunciation, betrayal:
it is weariness, I go for weariness of thee,
Gold, ivory, flesh, love, God, blood, moon-
I have become the expert of the catalogue.

My body once so familiar with glory,
My body has become a museum:
this part remembered because of someone's mouth,
this because of a hand,
this of wetness, this of heat.

Who owns anything he has not made?
With your beauty I am as uninvolved
as with horses' manes and waterfalls.
This is my last catalogue.
I breathe the breathless
I love you, I love you -
and let you move forever. ~ Leonard Cohen

The fact that Holmes had earlier lodgings in Montague Street (alongside the British Museum) is forgotten. That was before Watson and we must have Watson too. ~ Christopher Morley

To permit this gross new revelation to fade, or be forgiven, would be to devalue our most essential standard of what constitutes the unpardonable. And for what? For the reputation of a man who turns out to be not even a Holocaust denier but a Holocaust affirmer. There has to be a moral limit, and either this has to be it or we must cease pretending to ourselves that we observe one. ~ Christopher Hitchens

In some ways painters have been more important in my life than writers. Painters teach you how to see - a faculty that usually isn't highly developed in poets. Whether you take a walk in the woods with a painter, or go to a museum with one, through them you notice shapes, colors, harmonies, relationships that enhance your own seeing. ~ Carolyn Kizer

Man reaches a point in his life when unchanging becomes a matter of pride; the habits and remnants of youth are thereafter kept in the museum of the self. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

The Joker's henchmen break into the museum and empty the display cases; this occurs repeatedly, again and again: finally it can be reckoned upon beforehand and becomes a part of the exhibition. ~ Jonathan Lethem

I think about museums often. There are things that I want museums to do that they often don't. For me, I like it when there's a system within the museum that can continuously change - whether it's a museum that is nomadic or one that's designed so the building can shape-shift. I like restless spaces, and I want to be engaged. ~ Doug Aitken

We both had wanted to see a Mark Rothko exhibit at the Yale Art Gallery but, because of a labor dispute, some of the university's buildings, including the museum, were closed. As Bill and I walked by, he decided he could get us in if we offered to pick up the litter that had accumulated in the gallery's courtyard. Watching him talk our way in was the first time I saw his persuasiveness in action. We had the entire museum to ourselves. We wandered through the galleries talking about Rothko and twentieth-century art. I admit to being surprised at his interest in and knowledge of subjects that seemed, at first, unusual for a Viking from Arkansas. We ended up in the museum's courtyard, where I sat in the large lap of Henry Moore's sculpture Drape Seated Woman while we talked until dark. ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton

Youth. Murder (Biko). Slavery. Freedom. We are all creatures of ignorance at the end of the day. The natural order of the hierarchy of life states that we are creatures. Creatures of habit whether it is normal (following the status quo and all of that jazz). Creatures of marching orders and almost sanitary routine. Creatures of the abnormal. Our leaders are coldly obliterating the past. It is impossible to destroy nations, tribes, individuals without their permission. Many lessons learned from the past come to life like the connect the dots game of a child in a museum. We are swift to forget history. Bury the past like yesterday's newspaper, our infirm and elderly in nursing homes. ~ Abigail George