Quotes About Curation

Among your books, in this assortment that does not make up a library, a dead or dormant part can still be distinguished, which is the store of volumes put aside, books read and rarely reread, or books you have not and will not read but have still retained (and dusted), and then a living part, which is the books you are reading or plan to read or from which you have not yet detached yourself or books you enjoy handling, seeing around you.

You start to think in terms of making an album that might be greater than the sum of its parts. It's sort of like having a lot of footage and then editing it into something that will make sense to a viewer, you know. Sometimes it might involve even working on an older song that might complete that picture.

We love curating; we love discovering new products and vintage pieces.

Books like friends, should be few and well-chosen.

What we don't include is as important as what we do include.

Our office acts like a kind of educational establishment and we are very careful who we educate.

I think the curation consternation is this: Just because you like something or list something, are you really curating?

Only by fumbling with countless bits of knowledge, and then ignoring most of it, does a creative mind craft something original.

There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.

A library is not information; it is a means of preserving information. In every case, before memory or information can be stored, someone must decide what must be stored. Someone must choose. Someone must curate.

To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.

Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.

She says I ought to throw out at least two books for every one I buy. I had new bookshelves put up in the cottage after moving in, but already the to-be-read pile is mounting on to floor of the spare room.

At Linus Pauling's sixtieth birthday celebration, a student asked him, "Dr. Pauling, how does one go about having good ideas?" He replied, "You have a lot of ideas and throw away the bad ones.

winnowing of history,

Give me a museum, and I'll fill it.