Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes

Greece appears to be the fountain of knowledge; Rome of elegance

Individually, museums are fine institutions, dedicated to the high values of preservation, education and truth; collectively, their growth in numbers points to the imaginative death of this country.

Christianity is the very root and foundation of Western civilization.

A country, a style or an epoch are interesting only for the idea behind them.

For me, clothing has always been connected to history. That's what draws me in.

Think about what happens when architecture becomes ruins. All you have left are some little columns on a cliff, but it's still such an overwhelming experience that you could say architecture is that which makes ruins beautiful.

My grandfather, who's still alive, has always been involved in art, antiques, and things like that. I think I learned so much from him.

I remember touring the Medici palace in Florence when I was younger and I was entranced by the beauty and elegance of every space.

I adore the classical pieces of our culture. The Greek and Roman are still inside and everywhere; it's impossible to disconnect.

In the West, since the collapse of communism and the fall of the Soviet Union, the one discipline both the official and unofficial cultures have united in casting aside has been history.

Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth! Immortal, though no more! though fallen, great!

Egypt is full of dreams, mysteries, memories.

Thirty centuries of history allow us to look with supreme pity on certain doctrines which are preached beyond the Alps by the descendants of those who were illiterate when Rome had Caesar, Virgil, and Augustus.

The grand style is available now only in old poems, museums, and parodies.

In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.

Myths are so intimately bound to culture, time, and place that unless the symbols, the metaphors, are kept alive by constant recreation through the arts, the life just slips away from them.

There's such a history, and to be here, and to feel that, is really amazing.

They all start competing against Lincoln as the greatest president. And the [library] building becomes the symbol, the memorial to that dream.

I love exaggerated, and I love eccentric, but you must be comfortable. Otherwise it is nonsense. There is nothing charming about a woman who cannot walk in her shoes.

When men die, they enter history. When statues die, they enter art. This botany of death is what we call culture.

Not a stone but has its history.

Time has lost all meaning in that nightmare alley of the Western world known as the American mind. We wallow in nostalgia but manage to get it all wrong. True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories... but American-style nostalgia is about as ephemeral as copyrighted d?j? vu.

Legends have always played a powerful role in the making of history. ... Without ever relating facts reliably, yet always expressing their true significance, they offered a truth beyond realities, a remembrance beyond memories.

Good style, to me, is unseen style.

I think that you can treat a classic like a museum piece -stuffed and mounted- or you can make it a living, breathing narrative that is unfolding right then and there.