Some lines are born quotations, some are made quotations, and some have "quotation" thrust upon them..

People who rarely read long books, or even short stories, still appreciate the greatest examples of the shortest literary genres. I have long been fa….

The attribution of a speaker is in fact a part of the quotation. Some statements simply are better if a certain famous person said them..

I wonder if "an" ever occurs before "haughty" except in a quotation, or whether you can make anything sound like a quotation by adding a word like "g….

A single gnomic line can come to resonate with centuries of subsequent wisdom..

Anatole France frankly advised, "When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it." Yes, indeed, but do more. Copy many….

An anthology of quotations is a museum of utterances..

Unless created as freestanding works, quotations resemble "found" art. They are analogous, say, to a piece of driftwood identified as formally intere….

Reframing an extract as a quotation constitutes a kind of coauthorship. With no change in wording, the cited passage becomes different. I imagine tha….

Not everything that can be extracted appears in anthologies of quotations, in commonplace books, or on the back of Celestial Seasonings boxes. Only c….

We sometimes think of quotations as extracts from larger texts, but some quotations originated complete unto themselves..