Justin Kaplan Quotes

4 Sourced Quotes

We speak a language that draws on quotations. They are telegraphic, a form of shorthand. We use them to lend point and luster to what we say.

Justin Kaplan

How like an eel this essay creature is. It wriggles between narcissism and detachment, opinion and fact, the private party and the public meeting, omphalos and brain, analysis and polemics, confession and reportage, persuasion and provocation.

Justin Kaplan

We use quotations, like the Biblical Shibboleth, as passwords and secret handshakes, socially strategic signals that say, I understand you. We speak the same language.

Justin Kaplan

Quotations have always been supremely effective rhetorical devices, instruments of one-upmanship, ways of supporting any position under the sun with borrowed or stolen authority.

Justin Kaplan

Justin Kaplan

Justin Kaplan

Born: September 5, 1925

Died: March 2, 2014 (aged 88)

Bio: Justin Daniel "Joe" Kaplan was an American writer and editor. The general editor of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, he was best known as a biographer, particularly of Samuel Clemens, Lincoln Steffens, and Walt Whitman.

Known for:

Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography (1966)
Walt Whitman: A Life (1980)
Lincoln Steffens (1974)

Justin Kaplan on Wikipedia

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