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I love the description of Gothic churches before the printed word, that they were the bibles of the poor.

I'm not a religious person. But, when I look at a beautiful cathedral, what brings awe, what induces awe is the idea that architecture, you know, a beautiful cathedral, a beautiful building.

Walking at random through the streets, we came by chance upon the Cathedral of Notre Dame. I shall long remember my first impression of the scene within. The lofty gothic ceiling arched far above my head and through the stained windows the light came but dimly - it was all still, solemn and religious.

When I went to Europe a few years ago, I felt very at home there, and I loved standing in Notre Dame and looking at all the gargoyles on the outside of that building and realizing that, as scary and frightening as they were, what I was looking at was something that was built to the glory of God.

So much of our fictional medievalism is distorted through a lens of Protestantism and the Reformation, slanted even further through Victorian anti-Catholicism. The depiction of actual medieval attitudes toward the Church is remarkably rare.

Gothic architecture requires individual craftsmanship. The wish to create an enclosed world for the congregation gives rise in Gothic architecture to the need to create something wherein the activity of the congregation plays a part.

So I may not have had a gothic childhood, but childhood makes its own gothicity.

Revived in this country the long forgotten beauties of Gothic architecture.

I loved every second of Catholic church. I loved the sickly sweet rotting-pomegranate smells of the incense. I loved the overwrought altar, the birdbath of holy water, the votive candles; I loved that there was a poor box, the stations of the cross rendered in stained glass on the windows.