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The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.

It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled.

The Egyptian was the reverse of a theorist or mere thinker. He wanted to perceive with his senses how the soul took its way from the dead body into higher realms - he wanted to have this constructed before him.

To me, architecture is an art, naturally, and it isn't architecture unless it's alive. Alive is what art is. If it's not alive, it's dead, and it's not art.

Architecture is exposed to life. If its body is sensitive enough, it can assume a quality that bears witness to past life.

Inherent in architecture, it involves everything in life so that there is absolutely no end to it. By the time you're seventy or eighty, you're still beginning. So, that's the kind of life I've preferred to being the expert at forty and dead, you know.

The dead govern the living.

It's not new that architecture can profoundly affect a place, sometimes transform it. Architecture and any art can transform a person, even save someone.

The Egyptian tomb was the outcome of the Mesopotamian influence and followed from the religious crisis the country had undergone.

I've always wanted to see what Egypt was like when they were building the pyramids or Rome at the height of the empire or Greece - more specifically, Crete before it was destroyed. Why? Because I'm curious how we all hung out on a day to day basis, what was the chit chat, etc. Reading things in a book never gives you the feel.