Janet Echelman Quotes

“I believe people can have a profound experience by being surrounded by something beautiful - that's what I aim for. My sculpture is about the way you feel when you're standing under it and inside it. It's experiential art.”

“I never studied sculpture, engineering or architecture. In fact, after college I applied to seven art schools and was rejected by all seven.”

“As a child, I always enjoyed building forts by stringing up bed sheets and clothes. I continue to be inspired by makeshift structures, including my own kids' forts and temporary architecture of all sorts.”

“I believe that public space should be intentional: it should be obvious that you belong.”

“Pierre Janet, a French professor of psychology who became prominent in the early twentieth century, attempted to fully chronicle late- Victorian hysteria in his landmark work The Major Symptoms of Hysteria. His catalogue of symptoms was staggering, and included somnambulism (not sleepwalking as we think of it today, but a sort of amnesiac condition in which the patient functioned in a trance state, or "second state," and later remembered nothing); trances or fits of sleep that could last for days, and in which the patient sometimes appeared to be dead; contractures or other disturbances in the motor functions of the limbs; paralysis of various parts of the body; unexplained loss of the use of a sense such as sight or hearing; loss of speech; and disruptions in eating that could entail eventual refusal of food altogether. Janet's profile was sufficiently descriptive of Mollie Fancher that he mentioned her by name as someone who "seems to have had all possible hysterical accidents and attacks." In the face of such strange and often intractable "attacks," many doctors who treated cases of hysteria in the 1800s developed an ill-concealed exasperation.”

“I'm no expert. I have no psychic powers, and I sure don't possess any secret wisdom. I'm just Janet. I have strengths, weaknesses, fears, happiness, sadness. I experience joy and I experience pain. I'm highly emotional. I'm very vulnerable.”

“The Department of Justice is committed to asking one central question of everything we do: What is the right thing to do? Now that can produce debate and I want it to be spirited debate. I want the lawyers of America to be able to call me and tell me: Janet have you lost your mind?”

“...there must be an inviolate place where the choices and decisions, however imperfect, are the writer's own, where the decision must be as individual and solitary as birth or death.”

“All writers--all beings--are exiles as a matter of course. The certainty about living is that it is a succession of expulsions of whatever carries the life force...All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land..”

“Gee, I'm sorry I didn't hear you in all this rain. Go ahead in, please."Anthony Perkin's Norman BatesTalking To Janet Leigh's Marion Crane.”