Quotation Marks Quotes

• There is no way you can use the word “reality” without quotation marks around it.

  Joseph Campbell

  Reality, Knowing Who You Are, Use

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• For me, it's a way to find a fiction within a fiction. To find a way to uncover that blunder within the "lie," because when you look closer, every "lie" - and I say that with quotation marks - can be much more complicated. Because that is what fiction is: it's probably the least important thing in the world. It's rich, but it is put-on, it passes the time. It borrows from the world, but it does not invent it.

  Sergio Chejfec

  Lying, Important, Doe

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I've always hated quotation marks: they're ugly on the page and they classify the text for you, putting dialogue in one box and narration in another.

  Catherine Brady

  Ugly, Pages, Boxes

  Source: therumpus.net

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• When I decided to stop using quotation marks, it presented technical challenges: you have to conceive of dialogue differently and structure it differently for this to work. So I had a new problem, which makes writing interesting again.

  Catherine Brady

  Writing, Interesting, Challenges

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I want to rip off your logic and make passionate sense to you. I want to ride in the swing of your hips. My fingers will dig in you like quotation marks, blazing your limbs into parts of speech.

  Jeffrey McDaniel

  Rip, Swings, Speech

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• We built [socialistic society] for the sake of real personal liberty, liberty without quotation marks.

  Joseph Stalin

  Real, Liberty, Sake

  Joseph Stalin (1978). “1934-1940”

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• I know people are really interested in everything that the celebrities are doing, even if you don't consider yourself a "celebrity." What always would drive me crazy is - I took ethics classes in college - and it always amazes me how there would blatantly be something that I did not say in quotation marks. If you're putting quotation marks around it, it better be exactly what that person said.

  Carrie Underwood

  Crazy, College, Class

  Source: www.sheknows.com

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• In a print interview, as you may or may not know, they [editors] can do whatever they want. And they do. This is why most people are more hesitant to do print, because they can change it, and they do change it. They even change things that are in quotation marks, which is a pet peeve of mine. I've said to numerous reporters, "Would you read me back my direct quotes?" And they always say no. They always say that's against the policy.

  Fran Lebowitz

  Editors, People, Pet

  Interview with Sam Adams, www.avclub.com. June 17, 2011.

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• Quotation marks quotato marks! Bah!

  James Joyce

  Mark, Quotations

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• In the museums, everything is in quotation marks.

  Mason Cooley

  Museums, Mark, Quotations

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• I took ethics classes in college, and it always amazes me how they [tabloids] will blatantly say something that I did not say, in quotation marks. The first thing that we learned in ethics is that you better have it right. If you're putting quotation marks around something, it better be exactly what that person said.

  Carrie Underwood

  College, Class, Firsts

  Source: collider.com

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• We are cooling. We are not warming. The warming you see out there, the supposed warming, and I use my finger quotation marks here, is part of the cooling process.

  Michael Steele

  Use, Process, Fingers

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• What I had thought were signs of a broken educational system - the seemingly random placement of commas, the spastic syntax, the obnoxious overuse of quotation marks, the goofy misspelling of 'Jouralism' - were actually signs of the New Instantaneousness. 'Instant Jouralists' cannot be concerned with punctuation and grammar and spelling. That stuff just 'slows you down.' To be an 'Instant Jouralist,' you have to write as if you were being pursued by a cheetah across the Serengeti.

  Nicholas G. Carr

  Educational, Writing, Broken

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• I don't want to use quotation marks anymore, I've gone back and forth with them. In Ghosts, I didn't use them, for instance, all the way back in the early eighties.

  Paul Auster

  Gone, Use, Want

  Interview with Nathalie Cochoy and Sophie Vallas, transatlantica.revues.org. March 2014.

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• Authors hide their big thefts by putting small ones between quotation marks.

  Paul Eldridge

  Bigs, Theft, Quotations

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• Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.

  H. L. Mencken

  Next, Grammar, Chiefs

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “American Language Supplement 2”, p.593, Knopf

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• I like commas. I detest semi-colons — I don’t think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn’t need them, they were fly-specks on the page.

  E. L. Doctorow

  Thinking, Long Ago, Needs

  "EL Doctorow: 'I don't have a style, but the books do'" by Sarah Crown, www.theguardian.com. January 22, 2010.

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• Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she'd invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words--"friend" and "real" and "story" and "change"--words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like "identity" and "search" and "cloud," had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had "American" become an ironic term? How had "democracy" come to be used in an arch, mocking way?

  Jennifer Egan

  Stars, Real, Book

  Jennifer Egan (2010). “A Visit from the Goon Squad”, p.262, Anchor

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• Like italics and hyphens, quotation marks are to be used as sparingly as possible. They should light the way, not darken it.

  Eric Partridge

  Writing, Light, Way

  Eric Partridge (2003). “You Have a Point There: A Guide to Punctuation and Its Allies”, p.125, Routledge

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• Beware the writer who always encloses the word *reality* in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you. Or into you.

  Edward Abbey

  Reality, Trying, Language

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.13, RosettaBooks

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• Avoid overuse of 'quotation “marks.”'

  William Safire

  Mark, Quotations

  William Safire, Leonard Safir (1990). “Words of Wisdom”, p.213, Simon and Schuster

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• Wouldn't the sentence 'I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-and-Chips sign' have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?

  Martin Gardner

  Want, Chips, Hyphens

  Martin Gardner (2006). “Aha! A Two Volume Collection: Aha! Gotcha Aha! Insight”, MAA

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• It is an old error of man to forget to put quotation marks where he borrows from a woman's brain

  Anna Garlin Spencer

  Men, Errors, Brain

  Anna Garlin Spencer (1908). “Woman's Share in Social Culture”

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• And we are quotation marks, inverted and upside down, clinging to one another at the end of this life sentence. Trapped by lives we did not choose.

  Tahereh Mafi

  Upside Down, Ends, This Life

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• In the theater, while you recognized that you were looking at a house, it was a house in quotation marks. On screen, the quotation marks tend to be blotted out by the camera.

  Arthur Miller

  House, Cameras, Television

  "TV's Custom-Tailores 'Salesman'" by Don Shewwy, www.nytimes.com. September 15, 1985.

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