Gary Saul Morson Quotes
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A single gnomic line can come to resonate with centuries of subsequent wisdom.
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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.
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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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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"?
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We sometimes think of quotations as extracts from larger texts, but some quotations originated complete unto themselves.
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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.
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An anthology of quotations is a museum of utterances.
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Some lines are born quotations, some are made quotations, and some have "quotation" thrust upon them.
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People who rarely read long books, or even short stories, still appreciate the greatest examples of the shortest literary genres. I have long been fascinated by these short genres. They seem to lie just where my heart is, somewhere between literature and philosophy.
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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.