Museums of Turkey

Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.
-Phillips Brooks 

Statues and pictures and verse may be grand, 

But they are not the Life for which they stand.

-James Thomson

The monuments of the nations are all protests against nothingness after death; so are statues and inscriptions; so is history.

-Lew Wallace

                                                                             Artemis

Your work is carved out of agony as a statue is carved out of marble.
-Louise Bogan

"The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. . . . Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you."

-from J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye

History is representational, while time is abstract; both of these artifices maybe found in museums, where they span everybody's own vacancy.
-Robert Smithson

If I'm remembering correctly, this is a statue that used to reside in the ancient city of Ephesus. Legend has it that it stood (or lay?) outside a brothel in the city. Young men were supposed to compare their foot size to the statue's; if it was smaller than the statue's, they were too young to be going to a brothel.

A skeleton in the floor of the archaeological museum in Istanbul. There was no description, no placard indicating why it was there or who it was. There was only a two rather morbid lights shining on it: blue and yellow.

One of the few pre-iconoclastic mosaics still intact. 

One of the many representations of the Mother Goddess, though this one is perhaps the most famous.

                                      Another representation of the mother goddess.