Museum Quotes

“i am a museum full of art
but you had your eyes shut”
― Rupi Kaur, milk and honey

“Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.”
― Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence

“All the fires of hell could burn for a thousand years and it wouldn't equal what I feel for you in one minute of the day. I love you so much there is no pleasure in it. Nothing but torment. Because if I could dilute what I feel for you to the mil­lionth part, it would still be enough to kill you. And even if it drives me mad, I would rather see you live in the arms of that cold, soulless bastard than die in mine," Merripen said to Win.”
― Lisa Kleypas, Seduce Me at Sunrise

“What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?

That, by the way, is a phrase of Julian's. I remember it from a lecture of his on the Iliad, when Patroklos appears to Achilles in a dream. There is a very moving passage where Achilles overjoyed at the sight of the apparition – tries to throw his arms around the ghost of his old friend, and it vanishes. The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star…

Which reminds me, by the way, of a dream I had a couple of weeks ago.

I found myself in a strange deserted city – an old city, like London – underpopulated by war or disease. It was night; the streets were dark, bombed-out, abandoned. For a long time, I wandered aimlessly – past ruined parks, blasted statuary, vacant lots overgrown with weeds and collapsed apartment houses with rusted girders poking out of their sides like ribs. But here and there, interspersed among the desolate shells of the heavy old public buildings, I began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble.

I went inside one of these new buildings. It was like a laboratory, maybe, or a museum. My footsteps echoed on the tile floors.There was a cluster of men, all smoking pipes, gathered around an exhibit in a glass case that gleamed in the dim light and lit their faces ghoulishly from below.

I drew nearer. In the case was a machine revolving slowly on a turntable, a machine with metal parts that slid in and out and collapsed in upon themselves to form new images. An Inca temple… click click click… the Pyramids… the Parthenon.

History passing beneath my very eyes, changing every moment.

'I thought I'd find you here,' said a voice at my elbow.

It was Henry. His gaze was steady and impassive in the dim light. Above his ear, beneath the wire stem of his spectacles, I could just make out the powder burn and the dark hole in his right temple.

I was glad to see him, though not exactly surprised. 'You know,' I said to him, 'everybody is saying that you're dead.'

He stared down at the machine. The Colosseum… click click click… the Pantheon. 'I'm not dead,' he said. 'I'm only having a bit of trouble with my passport.'

'What?'

He cleared his throat. 'My movements are restricted,' he said.

'I no longer have the ability to travel as freely as I would like.'

Hagia Sophia. St. Mark's, in Venice. 'What is this place?' I asked him.

'That information is classified, I'm afraid.'

1 looked around curiously. It seemed that I was the only visitor.

'Is it open to the public?' I said.

'Not generally, no.'

I looked at him. There was so much I wanted to ask him, so much I wanted to say; but somehow I knew there wasn't time and even if there was, that it was all, somehow, beside the point.

'Are you happy here?' I said at last.

He considered this for a moment. 'Not particularly,' he said.

'But you're not very happy where you are, either.'

St. Basil's, in Moscow. Chartres. Salisbury and Amiens. He glanced at his watch.

'I hope you'll excuse me,' he said, 'but I'm late for an appointment.'

He turned from me and walked away. I watched his back receding down the long, gleaming hall.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I believe in walking out of a museum before the paintings you've seen begin to run together. How else can you carry anything away with you in your mind's eye?”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Swan Thieves

“...That's why we have the Museum, Matty, to remind us of how we came, and why: to start fresh, and begin a new place from what we had learned and carried from the old.”
― Lois Lowry, Messenger

“I've never been somewhere I belonged, but there are places where I think I could be happy. Like San Francisco. Well, do art museums count? Because I feel like I belong in them.”
― Heather Demetrios, I'll Meet You There

“Are you all right, Sir?" asked Hezekiah.
"Just fighting over old battles in my mind," said John. "It's the problem with age. You have all these rusty arguments, and no quarrel to use them in. My brain is a museum, but alas, I'm the only visitor, and even I am not terribly interested in the displays."
Hezekiah laughed, but there was affection in it. "I would love nothing better than to visit there. But I'm afraid I'd be tempted to loot the place, and carry it all away with me.”
― Orson Scott Card, Heartfire

“Ist nicht eigentliches Ziel von Roman und Museum, unsere Erinnerungen so aufrichtig wie möglich zu erzählen und dadurch unser Glück in das Glück anderer zu verwandeln?”
― Orhan Pamuk, Masumiyet Müzesi

“There's a lot of pointing. A festival of pointing and at very close range to other people's eyes, given the width of the space. Also detracting from the exhibit's potential tranquility is the display cabinet of pinned specimens along one wall. I found this disturbing from the start. You don't see a whole lot of stuffed polar bears in the polar bear exhibit at the zoo, for instance. And butterflies have phenomenal vision so it's not like they can't see the mass crucifixion in their midst. I was offended on behalf of the butterflies and thus pleased with my offense. Let the empathizing begin! This volunteering thing was working already. I am a good person, hear me give!”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

“Seperti perpustakaan umum, atau museum, kebun binatang bertujuan melayani bidang pendidikan populer serta ilmu pengetahuan.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“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

“I want to meet a guy named Art. I'd take him to a museum, hang him on the wall, criticize him, and leave.”
― Jarod Kintz, There are Two Typos of People in This World: Those Who Can Edit and Those Who Can't

“The castle, as was to be expected, was overcrowded. Lots of stupid fucking people with their stupid fucking children, all of them taking stupid fucking pictures of stupid fucking things, preferring to watch reality through the stupid fucking screens of their stupid fucking phones, instead of experiencing it with their goddamned eyes, the stupid motherfuckers!”
― Keijo Kangur, I Hate Traveling

“You are a museum full of art. And I am a poet in search of inspiration.”
― Avijeet Das

“A dream is a short trip into the mind’s museum.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Oneironaut’s Diary

“You can't make a museum to preserve something that has never left.”
― Georgi Gospodinov, Time Shelter

“When you choose to be a poet, when you choose to spill like this, bleed like this, cry like this, your pain becomes an exhibit. A place for people to walk through and then leave when they are ready.

No one ever asks a museum if it's okay.”
― Rudy Francisco

“Dreams are the museum for artists.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Oneironaut’s Diary

“When I go to art museums, I push a bag of midget carrots in a baby stroller, and it feels like the stuff on the wall is watching me. As a fatheresque person of curiosity, I feel misunderstood, but at least The Ducks know me.”
― Jarod Kintz, Music is fluid, and my saxophone overflows when my ducks slosh in the sounds I make in elevators.

“Survival is a funny business, too. A losing game. Literally. They love us, and we lose them all. The ones who made us, the ones who gave us, the ones who sat down and played with us, the ones who held us, or just laid eyes on us. The ones who bought, traded, and sold us. Cleaned us, redeemed us, brought back the sheen on us. Loved us. Learned everything there is to know about us.”
― Christine Coulson, Metropolitan Stories

“Non-living things are not living, yet they live longer than the living.”
― John Joclebs Bassey, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“What is a museum without objects and artifacts? Empty. Or worse, a building full of very disoriented tourists.”
― Mackenzie Finklea, Beyond the Halls: An Insider's Guide to Loving Museums

“The sea is an underwater museum still awaiting its visitors.”
― Philippe Diolé

“The public space of the museum is not my favorite, loud and full of tourists and school groups and hungry hordes. Their curiosity is endearing---they're acolytes for the natural world. And the marble gleams with architectural detail and precious objects all around. But on these, my gray days, entering the building carries the weight of death: all the specimens, thousands of carcasses of every species, stuffed or otherwise retrieved from oblivion so we can know them, yet all dead. The birds I draw and paint, all dead. On these days, my only defense is to imagine every pinned butterfly taking wing, every stuffed marsupial waking up, every preserved plant specimen blooming and carpeting the marble floor like a time-lapse forest, and every bird coming to life, flying up to the dome and away. On the days when the fog comes and hooks into my gut like a sharp-toothed parasite, these visions can save me.
The steadier, more consistent salvation, of course, is the work. I can lose myself for hours drawing, for instance, the common loon, with its inky head, white banding at the neck, and an intricacy of pin dots and fractured rectangles cascading across the wings. With the right precision, I can bring the deadness of a bird skin to a striking facsimile of life.”
― Virginia Hartman, The Marsh Queen

“As departments, we aren't very respectful of one another. The geologists are the Rock People and Delores and Ginger are the Plant People. Here in Ornithology, we're the Bird People, the ichthyologists are the Fish People, the entomologists are the Bug People, those in Paleo are the Bone People, and Anthro is just Antho, because otherwise we'd have to call them the People People.”
― Virginia Hartman, The Marsh Queen

“Our lives are devoted to our absence—to the idea that no trace of ourselves should be left in our work.”
― Christine Coulson, Metropolitan Stories

“Melvin thought about the museum inhaling so much of the world—all that history, all that spiritual juice, all the passions and laments of each visitor—without ever really exhaling.”
― Christine Coulson, Metropolitan Stories

“I spent my 53rd birthday at the Oregon State Hospital Museum of Mental Health.”
― Steven Magee

“The Great Hall of Dinosaurs at Yale's Peabody Museum may not bill itself as a place of spiritual pilgrimage, but that's sure what it feels like to me.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs [Audio]