“Off I go, rummaging about in books for sayings which please me.”

Michel de Montaigne

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“She [Katie Roiphe] is an excellent quoter, a gift I once saw referred to as ‘arranging other people’s flowers.’”

Dwight Garner

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“Time was when readers kept commonplace books. Whenever they came across a pithy passage, they copied it into a notebook under an appropriate heading, adding observations made in the course of daily life. Erasmus instructed them how to do it; and if they did not have access to his popular De Copia, they consulted printed models or the local schoolmaster. The practice spread everywhere in early modern England, among ordinary readers as well as famous writers like Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, John Milton, and John Locke. It involved a special way of taking in the printed word. Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end (unless they are digital natives and click through texts on machines), early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality.”

Robert Darnton

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“Nor do apothegms only serve for ornament and delight, but also for action and civil use, as being the edge-tools of speech—which cut and penetrate the knots of business and affairs.”

Francis Bacon

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“Other people’s words are the bridge you use to cross from where you were to wherever you’re going.”

Zadie Smith

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“Quotation is something that happens a lot in the music world. Merle Haggard can mimic Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson perfectly. The Beatles, in ‘Back in the USSR,’ mimic The Beach Boys. Quotation is a phrase that is used all the time in jazz solos. It happens a lot in old-time string band music too. One song is always using a line from another song to brace it. But then goes off on another tangent. Minstrels did it all the time. Weird takes on Shakespeare plays, stuff like that. It’s just done automatically.”

Bob Dylan

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“When you start to become aware of these bogus quotations, you can’t stop finding them. Henry James, George Eliot, Picasso—all of them are being kept alive in popular culture through pithy, cheery sayings they never actually said.”

Brian Morton

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“Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. Many will read the book before one thinks of quoting a passage. As soon as he has done this, that line will be quoted east and west.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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“Beware of a writer quoting too much; he may be quoting all he knows.”

Alfred Kazin

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“I will point out to what extent and in which ways adages should be used. In the first place, it is worth remembering that we should observe the same rule in making use of our adages as Aristotle elegantly recommended in his work on rhetoric with regard to the choice of epithets: that is to say, we should treat them not as food but as condiments, not to sufficiency but for delight. Then we must not insert them just where like; there are some places where it would be ridiculous to put jewels, and it is equally absurd to apply an adage in the wrong place.”

Desiderius Erasmus

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“By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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“It may be that the incomplete story, the particle, the fragment, is now the preferred unit of information for our culture, and lack of place is more useful for presenting these fragments than to fix them into sentences or grids.”

Frances Butler

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“We cannot, I maintain, no matter how we try, pick out anything from so great a multitude of things equally good—‘Only the poor man counts his flock.’ Whenever you direct your gaze, you will meet with something that might stand out from the rest, if the context in which you read it were not equally notable. For this reason, give over hoping that you can skim, by means of epitomes, the wisdom of distinguished men. Look into their wisdom as a whole; study it as a whole. They are working out a plan and weaving it together, line upon line, a masterpiece, from which nothing can be taken away without injury to the whole. Examine the separate parts, if you like, provided you examine them as parts of the man himself. She is not a beautiful woman whose ankle or arm is praised, but she whose general appearance makes you forget to admire her single attributes.”

Seneca

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“I quote others only in order the better to express myself.”

Michel de Montaigne

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“You ask me, most politely, to do something I disapprove—that is, to pluck from Victor Hugo’s writings some fragment that seems to me of especial excellence. I do not at all like this process of detaching from a work the purest or happiest portion of it. Is this not treating poems as children treat cakes—picking out the almonds to crunch and giving the rest to the dog?”

Paul Valéry

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