Top 100 Quotation Quotes
#1. A quotation in a speech, article or book is like a rifle in the hands of an infantryman. It speaks with authority.
Brendan Behan
#2. Inevitably, almost everything we say is either quotation or paraphrase.
Mason Cooley
#3. 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.
Gary Saul Morson
#4. Dialogue is not just quotation. It is grimaces, pauses, adjustments of blouse buttons, doodles on a napkin, and crossings of legs
Jerome Stern
#5. I hate when people say "quote" when what they really mean is "quotation." How's that for a quote?
Man Martin
#6. A clergyman generally dislikes to be met in argument by any scriptural quotation; he feels as affronted as a doctor does, when recommended by an old woman to take some favourite dose,
Anthony Trollope
#7. You know what my favourite quotation is? ... It's from Chaucer ... Criseyde says it, I am myne owene woman, wel at ese.
Mary McCarthy
#8. Her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible, - or from one of our elder poets, - in a paragraph of to-day's newspaper.
George Eliot
#9. Well named, Quotology contains everything you always wanted to know about quotations, quoters, quotees, quotation books, 'quoox' (quotations out of context), and their fascinating history.
Marjorie Garber
#10. I don't want to use quotation marks anymore, I've gone back and forth with them. In Ghosts, I didn't use them, for instance, all the way back in the early eighties.
Paul Auster
#11. Anne could not immediately fall into a quotation again. The sweet scenes of autumn were for a while put by - unless some tender sonnet, fraught with the apt analogy of the declining year, with declining happiness, and the images of youth and hope, and spring, all gone together, blessed her memory.
Jane Austen
#12. He let her do it, then looked around for his fingers. There they were, curled like a bloody quotation mark on the lead. He laughed.
Philip Pullman
#13. In this crazy mirror of terror and art a pseudo-quotation made up of obscure Shakespeareanisms (Chapter Three) somehow produces, despite its lack of literal meaning, the blurred diminutive image of the acrobatic performance that so gloriously supplies the bravura ending for the next chapter.
Vladimir Nabokov
#14. To be apt in quotation is a splendid and dangerous gift. Splendid, because it ornaments a man's speech with other men's jewels; dangerous, for the same reason.
Robertson Davies
#17. I caution against beginning or ending a quotation with ellipses.
Bill Walsh
#18. The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall.
Susan Sontag
#19. A forward critic often dupes us With sham quotations peri hupsos, And if we have not read Longinus, Will magisterially outshine us. Then, lest with Greek he over-run ye, Procure the book for love or money, Translated from Boileau's translation, And quote quotation on quotation.
Jonathan Swift
#20. I have a big collection of quotation programs ... In particular, I like MCR Software's Wisdom of the Ages, which has the best selection of relevant quotes I know.
Jerry Pournelle
#21. We are cooling. We are not warming. The warming you see out there, the supposed warming, and I use my finger quotation marks here, is part of the cooling process.
Michael Steele
#22. Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.
Samuel Johnson
#23. This one quotation could really serve as the emblem of this chapter: an artisan, who was touched by a neighbor, by a printed Bible in French, and above all by the Psalms.
William L. Holladay
#25. A great many complimentary things have been said about the faculty of memory, and if you look in a good quotation book you will find them neatly arranged.
Robertson Davies
#26. Quotation mistakes, inadvertency, expedition, and human lapses, may make not only moles but warts in learned authors ...
Thomas Browne
#27. But in the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. No one would think of making an after-dinner speech without the help of poetry. It used to be the classics, now it's lyric verse.
Evelyn Waugh
#28. [A] quotation is a handy thing to have about, saving one the trouble of thinking for oneself, always a laborious business.
(The Record Lie)
A.A. Milne
#29. That quotation about not having time to stand and stare has never applied to me. I seem to have spent a good part of my life - probably too much - in just standing and staring and I was at it again this morning.
James Herriot
#30. 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.
Peter James
#31. I like commas. I detest semi-colons - I don't think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn't need them, they were fly-specks on the page.
E.L. Doctorow
#32. But I have long thought that if you knew a column of advertisements by heart, you could achieve unexpected felicities with them. You can get a happy quotation anywhere if you have the eye.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#33. The two of us snuggled like quotation marks in his room full words.
Michelle Hodkin
#34. Skyler often thought that the Seneca quotation Poe included was a dig at Dupin-or perhaps Poe himself: Nil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio. "Nothing is more hateful to wisdom than excessive cleverness." "That's for sure," said Skyler aloud. "Or more succintly put, 'No one likes a smart ass'.
Haley Walsh
#35. There is no fiercer enemy than a word. A word that can be written down in pages and punctuated by quotation marks and commas and spelled out in contracts and poems and sighs, in old whispers and song lyrics, in promises and vows.
Alice Hoffman
#36. As long as we encourage a culture of victim hood, said Monty, with the rhythmic smoothness of self-quotation, we will continue to raise victims. And so the cycle of underachievement continues.
Zadie Smith
#37. We have a queen-size bed and the dog sleeps in the middle. John and I are sort of these little quotation marks on either corner.
Rachael Ray
#38. People say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes a mighty quotation is worth more than a thousand pictures.
Jakub Marian
#39. Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.
H.L. Mencken
#40. There is indeed a strange prejudice against Quotation.
James Boswell
#41. When people ask me if it has been a hard or easy road, I always answer with the same quotation, the end is nothing, the road is all.Willa Cather
Willa Cather
#42. Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.
Samuel Johnson
#43. Quotation, like much better things, has its abuses. One may quote till one compiles. The ancient lawyers used to quote at the bar till they had stagnated their own cause.
Isaac D'Israeli
#44. Opening the book is a quotation from the National Conference of Catholic Bishops that sums up the Prager-Telushkin view: It was Judaism that brought the concept of a God-given universal moral law into the world ... The Jew carries the burden of God in history [and] for this has never been forgiven.
George Gilder
#45. Quotation is a good thing, there is a community of thought in it.
Samuel Johnson
#46. Some lines are born quotations, some are made quotations, and some have "quotation" thrust upon them.
Gary Saul Morson
#47. In the dying world I come from, quotation is a national vice.
Evelyn Waugh
#49. I want to rip off your logic and make passionate sense to you. I want to ride in the swing of your hips. My fingers will dig in you like quotation marks, blazing your limbs into parts of speech.
Jeffrey McDaniel
#50. We have in my country (Russia) a quotation: It is impossible to make out of apology a fur coat.
Bernard Malamud
#51. They say 'stone walls do not a prison make nor iron bars a cage'. It was a quotation I knew as a boy. I had made it my own back then. I knew they couldn't capture my mind. Whilst I could still think, I was free.
Denis Avey
#52. Authors hide their big thefts by putting small ones between quotation marks.
Paul Eldridge
#55. I am only too aware that I am open to Rees's Second Law of Quotation: However sure you are that you have attributed a quotation correctly, an earlier source will be pointed out to you.
Nigel Rees
#56. If you use a colloquialism or a slang word or phrase, simply use it; do not draw attention to it by enclosing it in quotation marks. To do so is to put on airs, as though you were inviting the reader to join you in a select society of those who know better.
William Strunk Jr.
#57. Quotation is more universal and more ancient than one would perhaps believe.
James Boswell
#58. a quotation from the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset as an epigraph for Stoner: "A hero is one who wants to be himself." In
John Williams
#59. Liberals dispute that Reagan won the Cold War on the basis of their capacity to put mocking quotation marks around the word, won. That's pretty much the full argument: Restate a factual proposition with sneering quote marks.
Ann Coulter
#60. It is my belief that nearly any invented quotation, played with confidence, stands a good chance to deceive.
Mark Twain
#61. quotation from Einstein: 'The only thing more dangerous than ignorance is arrogance.' I would suggest to Dr. Chauncy that in combination, the two qualities are even more alarming.
Douglas Preston
#62. Through reproductive technology, postmodernist art dispenses with the aura. The fiction of the creating subject gives way to a frank confiscation, quotation, excerptation, accumulation, and repetition of already existing images. Notions of originality, authenticity, and presence ... are undermined.
Douglas Crimp
#63. The main objects of all science, the freedom and happiness of man ... [are] the sole objects of all legitimate government.
(A plaque with this quotation, with the first phrase omitted, is in the stairwell of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.)
Thomas Jefferson
#64. Too much traffic with a quotation book begets a conviction of ignorance in a sensitive reader. Not only is there a mass of quotable stuff he never quotes, but an even vaster realm of which he has never heard.
Robertson Davies
#66. I respect a man who can recognize a quotation. It's a dying art.
David Lodge
#67. They were curved together like quotation marks with no words in between.
Sarah Rees Brennan
#68. It is rather to be chosen than great riches, unless I have omitted something from the quotation.
Robert Benchley
#70. There is no way you can use the word "reality" without quotation marks around it.
Joseph Campbell
#71. Denial is commonly found among persons with dissociative disorders. My favorite quotation from such a client is, "We are not multiple, we made it all up." I have heard this from several different clients. When I hear it, I politely inquire, "And who is we?
Alison Miller
#72. Most of all I like "bad" lines, that is those considered bad, in my opinion unjustly, by theory. The reason for the last quotation marks is that most so-called theory is only a collection of examples from master practice.
Bent Larsen
#73. Mr. da Silva had a relevant quotation for everything that happened to him and in this way evaded real life.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#74. 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.
Gary Saul Morson
#75. She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit.
W. Somerset Maugham
#76. Sometimes you lose your way; you walk in the twilight of a forest; and suddenly you see an old but a beautiful house. And that old mossy house is a good quotation! It is old because it has wisdom; it is beautiful because it gives you a hope!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#77. I shall never be ashamed to go to a bad author for a good quotation.
Seneca.
#78. In the end is my beginning ... That's a quotation I've often heard people say.
Agatha Christie
#79. A garbled quotation is equivalent to a betrayal, an insult, a prejudice.
Emile M. Cioran
#80. I am now to offer some thoughts upon that sameness or familiarity which we frequently find between passages in different authors without quotation. This may be one of three things either what is called Plagiarism, or Imitation, or Coincidence.
James Boswell
#81. The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#82. And we are quotation marks, inverted and upside down, clinging to one another at the end of this life sentence. Trapped by lives we did not choose.
Tahereh Mafi
#83. And as their love had begun a little before a quotation, so it ended a little after one.
Robert Aickman
#84. I am wonderfully pleased when I meet with any passage in an old Greek or Latin author, that is not blown upon, and which I have never met with in any quotation.
Joseph Addison
#85. The quotation falsely attributed to Stalin, 'One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic,' gets the numbers wrong but captures a real fact about human psychology. (p. 220)
Steven Pinker
#86. I always have a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#87. 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.
George Orwell
#88. I'm a great believer in the direct quote in quotation marks and the hard fact.
Andrew Marr
#89. Quotations introduced by that are regarded as in indirect discourse and not enclosed in quotation marks.
William Strunk Jr.
#90. 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"?
Gary Saul Morson
#91. The origin of the name is an enigmatic quotation from James Joyce: "Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Stephen Hawking
#92. Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.
Emile M. Cioran
#93. Chumaka ended with a quotation from a play that Jiro favored. " 'Small acts partner small houses and small minds'.
Raymond E. Feist
#94. Quotation brings to many people one of the intensest joys of living.
Bernard Darwin
#95. I don't speak with proper grammar. I don't speak with dialogue attribution. I don't speak with quotation. I don't care about any of that stuff. It's about rhythm, and it's about what's in their [the character's] head, and what feels more natural. And it's about speed. I want things to move.
James Frey
#97. The art of quotation requires more delicacy in the practice than those conceive who can see nothing more in a quotation than an extract.
Isaac D'Israeli
#98. Whenever we would prepare the mind by a forcible appeal, an opening quotation is a symphony preluding on the chords whose tones we are about to harmonize.
Isaac D'Israeli
#99. Anyone who sees and paints a sky green and fields blue ought to be sterilized.
unsourced, suspected false quotation
Adolf Hitler
#100. Good teachers deserve apples; great teachers deserve chocolate. A favorite quotation, written in calligraphy on his office door.
Richard Hamming
