“Museums are the anthropological screened porches of suburbia. You can be near something great, but not actually personally experience it.”

“Screen porch in a tree.”

“Life experience. I can talk it up, vow to broaden my horizons, but I’m still limited to the experiences with my life.How can a person understand an experience that lies completely outside her own? She can see it, feel it, imagine what it would be like to live it, but it’s no different from seeing a movie on a screen and saying, “Thank God that’s not me”.”

“She's a mystery, a cipher, something nearly extinct these days: a person not controlled by ambition or greed or a crass need for attention, but by a desire to experience life completely and to make life a little easier for the people around her”

“In Italian museums are sometimes found little painted screens that the priest used to hold in front of the face of condemned men to hide the scaffold from them.”

“A book is like a person, and one's reaction to a person invariably has more to do with one's own personality and life experience than with the actual person herself.”