Gary Saul Morson Quotes

An anthology of quotations is a museum of utterances.

Some lines are born quotations, some are made quotations, and some have "quotation" thrust upon them.

We sometimes think of quotations as extracts from larger texts, but some quotations originated complete unto themselves.

A single gnomic line can come to resonate with centuries of subsequent wisdom.

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"?

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.