Gregory Colbert Quotations

I spent all my time at school in the library. Bad teachers can teach you to learn on your own.

My imagination has always been inspired by nature’s vision

Letter 1 To the princess of the elephants, I disappeared exactly one year ago. On that day I received a letter. It called me back to the place where my life with the elephants began Please forgive me, for the silence between us has been unbroken for one year. I will never be more of myself than in these letters. They are my maps of the bird path, and they are all that I know to be true.

Every culture from the Egyptians to the Mayans to the American Indians to the Bedouins created bestiaries that enabled them to express their relationship with nature. Ashes and Snow is a 21st-century bestiary filled with species from around the world. Nature’s orchestra includes not just Homo sapiens but elephants, whales, manatees, eagles, cheetahs, orangutans, and many others.

If you look at Paleolithic cave paintings, you see how people were depicted inside nature, not outside it. It was a kind of dream time. That's what I'm exploring.

The stars you see at night are the unblinking eyes of sleeping elephants, who sleep with one eye open to best keep watch over us.

Feather to fire,fire to blood Blood to bone,bone to marrow Marrow to ashes,ashes to snow

The works themselves can't be separate from the architecture or the music or the films. When you walk into the building, you're literally inside the work of art itself.

Ever since my house burned down, I see the moon more clearly.

This building has legs and it wants to have conversations in different cultural contexts and cities. This is almost like a pirate ship that's arrived ashore.