Quotation Quotes

187 Sourced quotes

Not all words... submit equally to this appropriation, to this seizure and transformation into private property: many words stubbornly resist, others remain alien, sound foreign in the mouth of the one who appropriated them and who now speaks them; they cannot be assimilated into his context and fall out of it; it is as if they put themselves in quotation marks against the will of the speaker.

Mikhail Bakhtin

Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? 'I love you' is always a quotation.

Jeanette Winterson

Quotation, n. The act of repeating erroneously the words of another. The words erroneously repeated.

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

"Why is a Kennaston?" he asked himself — thus whimisically voicing a real desire to know if human beings were intended for any especial purpose. Most of us find it more comfortable, upon the whole, to stave off such queries — with a jest, a shrug, or a Scriptural quotation, as best suits personal taste; but Kennaston was "queer" enough to face the situation quite gravely.

James Branch Cabell

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.

The investor has the benefit of the stock market's daily and changing appraisal of his holdings, for whatever that appraisal may be worth, and, second, that the investor is able to increase or decrease his investment at the market's daily figure—if he chooses. Thus the existence of a quoted market gives the investor certain options which he does not have if his security is unquoted. But it does not impose the current quotation on an investor who prefers to take his idea of value from some other source.

Benjamin Graham

When the modern scholar cites from a classic text, the quotation seems to burn a hole in his own drab page.

I respect a man who can recognize a quotation. It's a dying art.

She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit...

W. Somerset Maugham

Every quotation is out of context because the context of everything is everything and you can't transmit that … To be the most misquoted is to be the most quoted [man in British politics] and I'll settle for the combination.

Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.

We will encourage reporters to be as specific as possible about the source of any anonymous quotation.

Alan Rusbridger

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

The power of quotation is as dreadful a weapon as any which the human intellect can forge.

John Jay Chapman

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

Books are published with an expectation, if not a desire, that they will be criticised in reviews, and if deemed valuable that parts of them will be used as affording illustrations by way of quotation, or the like, and if the quantity taken be neither substantial nor material, if, as it has been expressed by some Judges, "a fair use" only be made of the publication, no wrong is done and no action can be brought.

William Wood, 1st Baron Hatherley

It was often difficult to think of an apt quotation when one was in a hurry.

An indirect quotation we can usually expect to rate only as better or worse, more or less faithful, and we cannot even hope for a strict standard of more and less; what is involved is evaluation, relative to special purposes, of an essentially dramatic act.

Willard van Orman Quine

A quotation is what a speaker wants to say—unlike a soundbite which is all that an interviewer allows you to say.

A quotation's only a short neat way of sayin' somethin' everybody knows, like "It's crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide."

Margery Allingham

A quotation, like a pun, should come unsought and then be welcomed only for some propriety or felicity justifying the intrusion.

Robert W. Chapman

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

The most superficial fact regarding the Discourses, the fact that the number of its chapters equals the number of books of Livy's History, compelled us to start a chain of tentative reasoning which brings us suddenly face to face with the only New Testament quotation that ever appears in Machiavelli's two books and with an enormous blasphemy.

It would be nice if sometimes the kind things I say were considered worthy of quotation. It isn't difficult, you know, to be witty or amusing when one has something to say that is destructive, but damned hard to be clever and quotable when you are singing someone's praises.