Quotations Quotes
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What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes? Take fifty of our current proverbial sayings—they are so trite, so threadbare, that we can hardly bring our lips to utter them. None the less they embody the concentrated experience of the race, and the man who orders his life according to their teaching cannot go far wrong. How easy that seems! Has any one ever done so? Never. Has any man ever attained to inner harmony by pondering the experience of others? Not since the world began! He must pass through the fire.
Norman Douglas
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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.
Gary Saul Morson
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The majority of critical, and plenty of uncritical, readers find quotations a bore.
Ethel Smyth
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[A]s if it were not the masterful will which subjugates the forces of nature to be the genii of the lamp... that forces a life-thought into a pregnant word or phrase, and sends it ringing through the ages!
William Mathews
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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.
Catherine Brady
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No future historian of the United States will be able to use quotations from her twentieth-century poets in support of an imperial policy of conquest and slaughter.
Alice Corbin Henderson