There is no way you can use the word “reality” without quotation marks around it.
When the modern scholar cites from a classic text, the quotation seems to burn a hole in his own drab page.
I've always hated quotation marks: they're ugly on the page and they classify the text for you, putting dialogue in one box and narration in another.
Full of wise saws and modern instances.
Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.
You evidently do not suffer from "quotation-hunger" as I do! I get all the dictionaries of quotations I can meet with, as I always want to know where a quotation comes from.
Any stupid remark, quoted often enough, becomes gospel.
People talk of situations, read books, repeat quotations.
In places this book is a little over-written, because Mr Blunden is no more able to resist a quotation than some people are to refuse a drink.
I get asked to read new works a lot, in the hope that I will give a quotation and I will only give a 'puff' for a book I truly love.
My impression of the American people can be summarized by a quotation from Benjamin Franklin, Those things that hurt instruct! I realised that people in this part of the world meet their problems head on. They attempt to get out of them rather than suffer them.
It's tragic how few people ever 'possess their souls' before they die. 'Nothing is more rare in any man', says Emerson, 'than an act of his own.' It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their life is a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? 'I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them. I did worship them but now I am alone on a rock hewn out of my own body.
For me, it's a way to find a fiction within a fiction. To find a way to uncover that blunder within the "lie," because when you look closer, every "lie" - and I say that with quotation marks - can be much more complicated. Because that is what fiction is: it's probably the least important thing in the world. It's rich, but it is put-on, it passes the time. It borrows from the world, but it does not invent it.
Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. Nothing in the world was irrelevant: the stars on a general's sleeve, the stock-market quotations, the olive harvest, the style of the judiciary, the wheat exchange, flower-beds. Nothing. This order, fearful and feared, whose details were all inter-related, had a meaning: my exile.
A knowledge of general literature is one of the evidences of an enlightened mind; and to give an apt quotation at a fitting time, proves that the mind is stored with sentential lore that can always be used to great advantage by its possessor.
We sometimes think of quotations as extracts from larger texts, but some quotations originated complete unto themselves.
Reframing an extract as a quotation constitutes a kind of coauthorship. With no change in wording, the cited passage becomes different. I imagine that the thrill of making an anthology includes the opportunity to become such a coauthor.
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 "goeth"?
Unless created as freestanding works, quotations resemble "found" art. They are analogous, say, to a piece of driftwood identified as formally interesting enough to be displayed in an art museum or to a weapon moved from an anthropological to an artistic display.... The presenter of found art, whether material or verbal, has become a sort of artist. He has not made the object, but he has made it as art.
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 well-said things. Pierce them together. Assimilate them. Make the process of reading them a way to form the mind and shape the soul. As anthologies can never be complete, we will never exhaust the ways quotations can enrich our lives.
Some lines are born quotations, some are made quotations, and some have "quotation" thrust upon them.
Not everything that can be extracted appears in anthologies of quotations, in commonplace books, or on the back of Celestial Seasonings boxes. Only certain sorts of extracts become quotations.
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