«Flat-out flatness, the hard line of the horizon. I like the little towns with their handfuls of buildings huddled close to the grain elevators, like medieval towns clustered around their cathedrals.»

«Films and gramophone records, music, books and buildings show clearly how vigorously a man's life and work go on after his ''death,'' whether we feel it or not, whether we are aware of the individual names or not. There is no such thing as death according to our view!»

«Buildings don't exist to be pinned, like brooches, on the front of bigger structures to which they bear only the most distant of relationships.»

«Construed as turf, home just seems a provisional claim, a designation you make upon a place, not one it makes on you. A certain set of buildings, a glimpsed, smudged window-view across a schoolyard, a musty aroma sniffed behind a garage when you were a child, all of which come crowding in upon your latter-day senses / those are pungent things and vivid, even consoling. But to me they are also inert and nostalgic and unlikely to connect you to the real, to that essence art can sometimes achieve, which is permanence.»

«Buildings, too, are children of Earth and Sun.»

«And as he went out of the temple, one of his disciples saith unto him, Master, see what manner of stones and what buildings are here! / And Jesus answering said unto him, Seest thou these great buildings? there shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.»

«And Jesus went out, and departed from the temple: and his disciples came to him for to shew him the buildings of the temple.»

«Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.»

«GARGOYLE, n. A rain-spout projecting from the eaves of mediaeval buildings, commonly fashioned into a grotesque caricature of some personal enemy of the architect or owner of the building. This was especially the case in churches and ecclesiastical structures generally, in which the gargoyles presented a perfect rogues' gallery of local heretics and controversialists. Sometimes when a new dean and chapter were installed the old gargoyles were removed and others substituted having a closer relation to the private animosities of the new incumbents.»

«As I was walking among the fires of Hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity, I collected some of their Proverbs, thinking that as the sayings used in a nation mark its character, so the Proverbs of Hell show the nature of Infernal wisdom better than any description of buildings or garments.»