One may quote till one compiles.
Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.
The habit some writers indulge in of perpetual quotation is one it behooves lovers of good literature to protest against, for it is an insidious habit which in the end must cloud the stream of thought, or at least check spontaneity. If it be true that le style c'est l homme, what is likely to happen if l homme is for ever eking out his own personality with that of some other individual?
After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
In the dying world I come from, quotation is a national vice.
I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.
Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted, than when we read it in the original author?
Quotation... A writer expresses himself in words that have been used before because they give his meaning better than he can give it himself, or because they are beautiful or witty, or because he expects them to touch a cord of association in his reader, or because he wishes to show that he is learned and well read. Quotations due to the last motive are invariably ill-advised; the discerning reader detects it and is contemptuous; the undiscerning is perhaps impressed, but even then is at the same time repelled, pretentious quotations being the surest road to tedium.
Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of language.
Quotations (such as have point and lack triteness) from the great old authors are an act of reverence on the part of the quoter, and a blessing to a public grown superficial and external.
It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.
One must be a wise reader to quote wisely and well.
When I decided to stop using quotation marks, it presented technical challenges: you have to conceive of dialogue differently and structure it differently for this to work. So I had a new problem, which makes writing interesting again.
Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.
We rarely quote nowadays to appeal to authority... though we quote sometimes to display our sapience and erudition. Some authors we quote against. Some we quote not at all, offering them our scrupulous avoidance, and so make them part of our "white mythology." Other authors we constantly invoke, chanting their names in cerebral rituals of propitiation or ancestor worship.
Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.
I think we must quote whenever we feel that the allusion is interesting or helpful or amusing.
There are two kinds of marriages, Benny — where the husband quotes the wife, or where the wife quotes the husband.
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.
Be careful -- with quotations, you can damn anything.
Learning is often spoken of as if we are watching the open pages of all the books which we have ever read, and then, when occasion arises, we select the right page to read aloud to the universe.
Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.
A good saying often runs the risk of being thrown away when quoted as the speaker's own. [Fr., C'est souvent hasarder un bon mot et vouloir le perdre que de le donner pour sien.]
An anthology of quotations is a museum of utterances.
Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.
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