Galleries Quotes

1. "When I'm traveling the world, I don't ever look anymore at the geography - just enough to catch galleries and paintings."
Author: Alber Elbaz

2. "I'm a contemporary artist and I show in art galleries and museums. I show a number of photographs and films, but I also make television programs, books and some appetizing, all with the same concept."
Author: Alison Jackson

3. "Paris was a universe whole and entire unto herself, hollowed and fashioned by history; so she seemed in this age of Napoleon III with her towering buildings, her massive cathedrals, her grand boulevards and ancient winding medieval streets--as vast and indestructible as nature itself. All was embraced by her, by her volatile and enchanted populace thronging the galleries, the theaters, the cafes, giving birth over and over to genius and sanctity, philosophy and war, frivolity and the finest art; so it seemed that if all the world outside her were to sink into darkness, what was fine, what was beautiful, what was essential might there still come to its finest flower. Even the majestic trees that graced and sheltered her streets were attuned to her--and the waters of the Seine, contained and beautiful as they wound through her heart; so that the earth on that spot, so shaped by blood and consciousness, had ceased to be the earth and had become Paris."
Author: Anne Rice

4. "What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration. One needn't be, shouldn't be, reduced to a puppy. If you wish to tell me that the city offers galleries, I'll pour you a drink and enjoy your company while it lasts; but I'll bear with me to my grave those pure moments at the Tate (was it the Tate?) where I stood planted, open-mouthed, born, before that one particular canvas, that river up to my neck, gasping, lost, receding into watercolor depth and depth to the vanishing point, buoyant, awed, and had to be literally hauled away. These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present."
Author: Annie Dillard

5. "Some prescient American collectors, including Vicki and Kent Logan and Mera and Donald Rubell, began collecting Chinese art before 2000 with a genuine passion, but as the auction prices exploded everyone was beating a path to the galleries and artist studios in China. It became the 'China thing.'"
Author: Arne Glimcher

6. "For me, meaning of design is to give soul to objects by Art. Art sometimes need to be in every part of daily life, not only in the galleries and museums."
Author: Baris Gencel

7. "Edinburgh is my favourite city. We'll be doing a lot of children's theatre and galleries."
Author: Carol Ann Duffy

8. "She stared out. She saw a vastness, a rising shape, indistinct in the rain, gray in the misty drizzle. At first she had thought it was a cloud, a great bank of fog drifting up over the mountains, but now she realized with a cold awe that it was real, a vast building climbing the mountainside, rising in a countless series of rooms, stairways, balconies, and galleries, far away and immense, its topmost roofs white with snow. And up there, like a needle sharp with ice, one uttermost pinnacle flew the remote black pennant of the Watch.The Tower of Song."
Author: Catherine Fisher

9. "Waste forces within him, and a desert all around, this man stood still on his way across a silent terrace, and saw for a moment, lying in the wilderness before him, a mirage of honourable ambition, self-denial, and perseverance. In the fair city of this vision, there were airy galleries from which the loves and graces looked upon him, gardens in which the fruits of life hung ripening, waters of Hope that sparkled in his sight. A moment and it was gone. Climbing to a high chamber in a well of houses, he threw himself down in his clothes on a neglected bed, and its pillow was wet with wasted tears."
Author: Charles Dickens

10. "In these silent sunless galleries he'd come to feel that another went before him and each glade he entered seemed just quit by a figure who'd been sitting there and risen and gone on. Some doublegoer, some othersuttree eluded him in these woods and he feared that should that figure fail to rise and steal away and were he therefore to come to himself in this obscure wood he'd neither be mended nor made whole but rather set mindless to dodder drooling with his ghosty clone from sun to sun across a hostile hemisphere forever."
Author: Cormac McCarthy

11. "Never trust the occultist who tells you that he is the head of a tradition, because if he were, in the first place, he would not tell the fact to the uninitiated, and in the second place he would in all probability be living in great seclusion and inaccessible to all but his immediate subordinates. If a man is a great artist he does not need to inform us of the fact; we shall know him by his pictures that are hung in the galleries of the nation, and we shall, moreover, find that he guards himself from casual acquaintances because of the inroads on his time to which his fame renders him liable. The more eminent a person, the harder he is to approach, not out of any spirit of pride and exclusiveness, but because so many people want to see him that discrimination has to be used in admitting them."
Author: Dion Fortune

12. "Ever since I'd started riding the train by myself I'd loved to go there alone and roam around until I got lost, wandering deeper and deeper in the maze of galleries until sometimes I found myself in forgotten halls of armor and porcelain that I'd never seen before (and, occasionally, was unable to find again)."
Author: Donna Tartt

13. "Why, I thought sadly, as he returned with his topcoat over his arm, why hadn't my mother married someone like him—? Or Mr. Bracegirdle? somebody she actually had something in common with—older maybe but personable, someone who enjoyed galleries and string quartets and poking around used book stores, someone attentive, cultivated, kind? Who would have appreciated her, and bought her pretty clothes and taken her to Paris for her birthday, and given her the life she deserved? It wouldn't have been hard for her to find someone like that, if she'd tried."
Author: Donna Tartt

14. "In that ugly building, amidst that weary praying and inharmonious singing, with that blatant tone, and, worse than all, that merciless doctrine, there was yet preaching — that rare speech of a man to his fellow-men whereby in their inmost hearts they know that he in his inmost heart believes. There was hardly an indifferent countenance in all that wide space beneath, in all those far-sloping galleries above. Every conscience hung out the red or pale flag."
Author: George MacDonald

15. "Entering by a wide gateway, but without gates, into an inner court,surrounded on all sides by great marble pillars supporting galleriesabove, I saw a large fountain of porphyry in the middle, throwingup a lofty column of water, which fell, with a noise as of the fusionof all sweet sounds, into a basin beneath; overflowing which, it raninto a single channel towards the interior of the building. Althoughthe moon was by this time so low in the west, that not a ray of herlight fell into the court, over the height of the surrounding buildings; yet was the court lighted by a second reflex from the sun ofother lands. For the top of the column of water, just as it spread tofall, caught the moonbeams, and like a great pale lamp, hung highin the night air, threw a dim memory of light (as it were) over thecourt below."
Author: George MacDonald

16. "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."
Author: Hakim Bey

17. "The stillness of the calm is awful. His voice begins to grow strange and portentous. He feels it in him like something swallowed too big for the esophagus. It keeps up a sort of involuntary interior humming in him, like a live beetle. His cranium is a dome full of reverberations. The hollows of his very bones are as whispering galleries. He is afraid to speak loud, lest he be stunned; like the man in the bass drum."
Author: Herman Melville

18. "In the Convention tomorrow I shall put him up to confront Saint-Just. Imagine it. Our man the picture of starched rectitude, and looking as if he has just devoured a beefsteak; and Camille making a joke or two at our man's expense and then talking about '89. A cheap trick, but the galleries will cheer. This will make Saint-Just lose his temper-not easy, since he cultivates this Greek statue manner of his—but I guarantee that Camille can do it. As soon as our man begins to bawl and roar, Camille will fold up and look helpless. That will get Robespierre on his feet, and we will all generate one of these huge emotional scenes. I always win those."
Author: Hilary Mantel

19. "Saint-Just read for the next two hours his report on the plots of the Dantonist faction. He had imagined, when he wrote it, that he had the accused man before him; he had not amended it. If Danton were really before him, this reading would be punctuated by the roars of his supporters from the galleries, by his own self-justificatory roaring; but Saint-Just addressed the air, and there was a silence, which deepened and fed on itself. He read without passion, almost without inflection, his eyes on the papers that he held in his left hand. Occasionally he would raise his right arm, then let it fall limply by his side: this was his only gesture, a staid, mechanical one. Once, towards the end, he raised his young face to his audience and spoke directly to them: "After this," he promised, "there will be only patriots left."
Author: Hilary Mantel

20. "The art galleries of Paris contain the finest collection of frames I ever saw."
Author: Humphry Davy

21. "The words a father speaks to his children in the privacy of the home are not overheard at the time, but, as in whispering galleries, they will be clearly heard at the end and by posterity."
Author: Jean Paul Richter

22. "I like what I see now in China, but I think the Japanese are a step ahead into craziness and weirdness. I go to galleries there that are the size of a New York elevator, and every time I'm surprised by the amazing things I find. I really hope I'll be able to promote some of these artists, to show their work in the West."
Author: Jean Pigozzi

23. "There are official searchers, inquisitors. I have seen them in the performance of their function: they always arrive extremely tired from their journeys; they speak of a broken stairway which almost killed them; they talk with the librarian of galleries and stairs; sometimes they pick up the nearest volume and leaf through it, looking for infamous words. Obviously, no one expects to discover anything."
Author: Jorge Luis Borges

24. "The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries."
Author: Jorge Luis Borges

25. "Lord Thornton," the Lord Chancellor was saying to Ian as Ian slowly rose, "it is the finding of this commission that you are innocent of all charges against you. You are free to leave." He paused as if debating something, then said, in what struck Elizabeth as a discordant note of humor, "I would like to suggest informally that if it is your intention to abide under the same roof as your wife tonight, you seriously reconsider that notion. In your place I would be sorely tempted to commit the act that you have already been accused of committing. Although," he added as laughter began to rumble through the galleries, "I feel certain you could count on an acquittal here on grounds of justifiable cause."
Author: Judith McNaught

26. "One of the the things she most liked about the city -apart from all its obvious attractions, the theatre, the galleries, the exhilarating walks by the river- was that so few people ever asked you personal questions."
Author: Julia Gregson

27. "Galleries, and they're all the same, and rightly so, they sell work."
Author: Kim Weston

28. "But art is not relative to perfection in any tangible sense. It is our coarse antennae trembling blindly as it traces the form of Origin, tastes the ephemeral glue welding us, yearning after the secret of ineluctable evolution, and wonders what this transformation will mean. In my mind, here was the best kind of art—the kind hoarded by rich and jealous collectors in their locked galleries; hidden from the eyes of the heathen masses, waiting to be shared with the ripe few"
Author: Laird Barron

29. "I never really took a proper art class in college. I just started reading art magazines and going to galleries. I was really drawn to it."
Author: Larry Gagosian

30. "Through our own creative experience we came to know that the real tradition in art is not housed only in museums and art galleries and in great works of art; it is innate in us and can be galvanized into activity by the power of creative endeavor in our own day, and in our own country, by our own creative individuals in the arts. We also came to realize that we in Canada cannot truly understand the great cultures of the past and of other peoples, until we ourselves commence our own creative life in the arts. Until we do so, we are looking at these from the outside."
Author: Lawren Harris

31. "There was the honour and austerity of money as he walked through art galleries, as he saw around him the collections of oil paintings by dead men, lit so carefully that warmth seemed to emanate from within - and not because their art was loved or understood but because it could be sold and bought for handsome sums."
Author: Lydia Millet

32. "I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it–our life–hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly.‘But let all this threaten to become impossible for ever, how beautiful it would become again! Ah! If only the cataclysm doesn't happen this time, we won't miss visiting the new galleries of the Louvre, throwing ourselves at the feet of Miss X, making a trip to India.‘The cataclysm doesn't happen, we don't do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn't have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening."
Author: Marcel Proust

33. "(All those paintings of women, in art galleries, surprised at private moments. Nymph Sleeping. Susanna and the Elders. Woman bathing, one foot in a tin tub - Renoir, or was it Degas? both, both women plump. Diana and her maidens, a moment before they catch the hunter's prying eyes. Never any paintings called Man Washing Socks in Sink.)"
Author: Margaret Atwood

34. "I love going to galleries, particularly the National Portrait Gallery."
Author: Mark Gatiss

35. "When I was a younger man, art was a lonely thing. No galleries, no collectors, no critics, no money. Yet, it was a golden age, for we all had nothing to lose and a vision to gain. Today it is not quite the same. It is a time of tons of verbiage, activity, consumption. Which condition is better for the world at large I shall not venture to discuss. But I do know, that many of those who are driven to this life are desperately searching for those pockets of silence where we can root and grow. We must all hope we find them."
Author: Mark Rothko

36. "An interesting thing happened in 1989, right as I was graduating: the stock market crashed and really changed the landscape of the art world in New York. It made the kind of work I was doing interesting to galleries that wouldn't have normally been interested in it."
Author: Matthew Barney

37. "For the last couple of years, I've always started in the same place. It's a little room, more like a little hallway, off one of the Impressionist galleries. That always bothered me. I mean, even in my most Edward-centric moments, I knew he didn't merit a big room of his own.But to tack his work onto the wrong era, not to mention any conceivable style, always chafed."
Author: Melissa Jensen

38. "We spend more time at cinemas, theaters, art galleries and theme parks than we do at churches, and they have become our new cathedrals. We can spend hours at any of these places of entertainment but if church service goes on too long we get impatient."
Author: Michael Huffington

39. "I love to be in front of big galleries."
Author: Natalie Gulbis

40. "I'm saving up to buy art. Nothing famous, but every time I'm in a new city I wander into galleries and dream about buying great pieces one day."
Author: Nicola Formichetti

41. "Persistent, flowing through fallen shadows,excavating tunnels, drilling silences,insisting, running under my pillow,brushing past my temples, covering my eyelidswith another, intangible skin made of air,its wandering nations, its drowsy tribesmigrate through the provinces of my body,it crosses, re-crosses under the bridges of my bones,slips into my left ear, spills out from my right,climbs the nape of my neck,turns and turns in my skull,wanders across the terrace of my forehead,conjures visions, scatters them,erases my thoughts one by onewith hands of unwetting water,it evaporates them,black surge, tide of pulse-beats,murmur of water groping forwardrepeating the same meaningless syllable,I hear its sleepwalking deliriumlosing itself in serpentine galleries of echoes,it comes back, drifts off, comes back,endlessly flings itselfoff the edges of my cliffs,and I don't stop fallingand I fall"
Author: Octavio Paz

42. "I grew up in a town where there were no galleries, no museums, no theaters - a very religious, ultraconservative community."
Author: Robert Wilson

43. "I like going to New York. I like the galleries and the theatre and the restaurants and bars and music. I think that city is more alive than Los Angeles."
Author: Sara Gilbert

44. "Just as the development of earth art and installation art stemmed from the idea of taking art out of the galleries, the basis of my involvement with public art is a continuation of wall drawings."
Author: Sol LeWitt

45. "But nothing happened there now of a nature to provoke a disturbance. There were no complaints to the management or the police, and the dark glory of the upper galleries was a legend in such memories as that of the late Emiel Kroger and the present Pablo Gonzales, and one by one, of course, those memories died out and the legend died out with them. Places like the Joy Rio and the legends about them make one more than usually aware of the short bloom and the long fading out of things. ("The Mysteries of the Joy Rio")"
Author: Tennessee Williams

46. "Read the folklore masters. Go to galleries. Walk in the woods. That's what you need to be an artist or storyteller."
Author: Terri Windling

47. "She wanted to explain everything to him—how certain notes of the Moonlight Sonata shredded her heart like wind inside a paper bag; how her soul felt as endless and deep as the sea churning on their left; how the sight of the young Muslim couple filled her with an emotion that was equal parts joy and sadness; and above all, how she wanted a marriage that was different from the dead sea of marriages she saw all around her, how she wanted something finer, deeper, a marriage made out of silk and velvet instead of coarse cloth, a marriage made of clouds and stardust and red earth and ocean foam and moonlight and sonatas and books and art galleries and passion and kindness and sorrow and ecstasy and of fingers touching from under a burqua."
Author: Thrity Umrigar

48. "And you can't help but worry for them, love them, want for them - those who go on down the close, foetid galleries of time and space without you."
Author: Tim Winton

49. "Painting, by its nature, cannot provide an object of simultaneous collective reception... as film is able to do today... And while efforts have been made to present paintings to the masses in galleries and salons, this mode of reception gives the masses no means of organizing and regulating their response. Thus, the same public which reacts progressively to a slapstick comedy inevitably displays a backward attitude toward Surrealism."
Author: Walter Benjamin

50. "But didn't everyone get everything? Hadn't they had enough yet? Everything on earth is tailored for this everyone. Everyone gets all the TV programs, damn near all the cinema, and about eighty percent of all music. After that come the secondary medium of painting and those other visual arts that do not move. Those are generally just for someone and although you always hear people moaning that there isn't enough of them, in truth someone does all right. Galleries, museums, basements in Berlin, studio flats, journals, bare walls in urban centers—someone gets what they want and deserve, most of the time. But where are the things that no one wants? Every now and then Alex would see or hear something that appeared to be for no one but soon enough it turned out to be for someone and, after a certain amount of advertising revenue had been spent, would explode into the world for everyone. Who was left to make stuff for no one?"
Author: Zadie Smith

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