A Pious Work Of Salvage

Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism-victimless collecting, as it were ... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.

... "Melancholy Objects" On Photography, Susan Sontag