Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

Quotations? Yes, I'll use them!

Don’t you love quotations? I am a quote freak, because as a writer I can do so many things with them. For one thing, they serve as great prompts. Then they are useful in backing me up. I show them as evidence to what I am saying.

“See, it isn’t just lil’ old me. Somebody real important says it, too.”

Quotes also embellish a piece of writing, especially when I run out of stuff to say. Then I stick in a quote or two and elaborate on the quote. Sad that I, a writer, have to depend on others’ quotes as fillers, in snippets or long blocks of text, but what can I do when in a bind? Something’s better than nothing.

Now that every other site on the net has quotes here and there, the cut and paste function has encouraged the repetition of published typos. Some hilarious results happen because of this. For example, let’s take Audrey Hepburn’s quote: “I believe in mink. I believe laughing is the best calorie burner.”

Anything wrong here? Yup. The real quote starts as, “I believe in pink.”

This makes me check several sites for every quote I quote. I might as well spend my time to come up with a sentence or two. But noooo. I need those quotes. They are authority. In other words, if I can’t come up with real jewels, I’ll borrow them.

Now a few quotes on quotations.

“Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted, than when we read it in the original author?”
Philip Gilbert Hamerton, The Intellectual Life, 1873

“I've compiled a book from the Internet. It's a book of quotations attributed to the wrong people.”
Jerry Seinfeld

“He wrapped himself in quotations—as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.”
Rudyard Kipling

"I am not merely a habitual quoter but an incorrigible one. I am, I may as well face it, more quotatious than an old stock-market ticker-tape machine, except that you can't unplug me.”
Joseph Epstein, "Quotatious," A Line Out for a Walk: Familiar Essays, 1991

“Life is like quotations. Sometimes it makes you laugh. Sometimes it makes you cry. Most of the time, you just don't get it.”
Author Unknown