What do quotes

In the United States, the rule of thumb is that commas and periods always go inside the quotation marks, and colons and semicolons dashes as well go outside :. If they apply to the quoted material, they go within the quotation marks. If they apply to the whole sentence, they go outside it :.

So now you know how to deal with quotation marks and punctuation and capitalization, but what if the quote you want to take already contains quotation marks?

This can happen, too. Say you want to write a direct quote in which someone is praising their favorite chapter from one of the Harry Potter books. Would you do it like this? You might even manage to confuse your word processing program. But if you do it like this, everything will look much better:. Titles of books, albums, magazines, newspapers, and other standalone and bigger bodies of work are usually italicized.

Poems, chapters, articles—smaller bodies of work, or bodies of work which form a larger body of work—are emphasized by using quotation marks. You can also use quotation marks to signify words used as words.

Some writers put quotes around words they want to distance themselves from. Quotation marks used this way are commonly called scare quotes or shudder quotes. Scare quotes are sort of like air quotes, and if you know anything about air quotes, you know that they should be used in moderation.

Typified words and voices can be sounded — not what someone actually said but a subtle note of comment or universality through some notional attribution. As Erasmus, again, has it. Recognising words as coming from elsewhere can endow them with special authority and beauty or, equally, be a means to rejecting or disclaiming them, or of seemingly avoiding personal responsibility even as we bring them forward for notice.

It can be used to avoid taking the credit — but at the same time perhaps gain it indirectly through association with some tradition or figure beyond oneself. This displaying is turned to many purposes: recognised as art, as the object of exegesis or contemplation, as something to be ridiculed or attacked. The literary device of allusiveness can link in subtle indirect ways to other people, places, times, ideas — even to other dimensions of oneself.

Multiple purposes and effects can go along together, or work out differently not only in differing times and places but for differing participants in the same moment. Within this bundle of usages there are near-infinite purposes to which the human activities of quoting can be turned.

This is what I have alluded to as the far and near of quoting , its paradoxical duality. In quoting we simultaneously enact past and present, enstage both ourselves and others. But quoting is pre-eminently so. It deploys words and voices from the past. Even a report of the most recent of conversations rehearses a prior event, while other wordings go back in actuality or perception for years or centuries.

Quotations connect to the personages of the past, not just within our families and intimates, but to iconic individuals and symbols of history. Using their words is to associate yourself with an evocative figure of the past. But to quote is not only to see them as before and beyond, but to bring them to the present and take them to yourself. It is to insert yourself into the unfolding of history — or of eternity — and lay claim to a part in it.

Some for renown, on scraps of learning dote, And think they grow immortal as they quote. Quoting is at once to capture voices from the past into the here and now, and to extend the present into the past — not immortality exactly, but a stride over the gap of chronology, a touch of continuity outside time.

It can be intimately personal, as for the British observers who quoted grandparents as a way of keeping them alive in memory, but it can go beyond that too. It resonates through quoting from sacred texts, from great literary models or from the words of some inspiring prototype. But uttering them — even with all the controls over rhythm, pitch, and voice quality that music provides — is also to some extent speaking the present Becker In quoting more than in any form of communicative interaction we forge a merger — of past transformed to present, present invested with the past.

We call on text or voice outside the self, beyond the ephemeral interests of the passing moment. Here is an external voice to which the speaker or reader of the moment conjoins their own, endowing it with the aura and tone of the other.

They put another perspective on some situation — the voice of revered authority, of some universal human dilemma, of the truth in proverb, of some recollected voice — and in doing so venture to bring that outside vision to themselves. Quoting can give speaker and listener a stance outside the quoted words, looking in from the outside. Here, some would say, is that key act of objectifying that enabled the scientific revolution or, for others, the great commentaries on literary and religious texts or the enduring human power to see themselves from the outside.

Here too lie the possibilities of parody, of mockery, of critique, contemplation, challenge. Chunks of words can be isolated — more, or less — away from the flow of action, set up for reflection or play, detached from the speaking or writing self. The distancing in turn draws the quoted voice and text near, seizing and judging it: standing back not just to externalise but to claim the right to hold an attitude to it, whether of approval, caution, admiration, disavowal, analysis, interpretation, irony, reference The words may indeed be torn from their earlier setting and stand as if independent and timeless.

But quoting is to re-enact them in another present. Something new is created, a fresh modulation and presence that is at the same time loaded with that older voice. It is both to distinguish the words and voices of others and to make them our own, both distancing and claiming.

Coming from different wings of linguistic-literary analysis one or the other concept has often been to the fore. They capture different elements, true, but can equally be seen as complementary dimensions of human expression. In the context of quoting they work inextricably together, mutually interdependent sides of the same coin. For quoting is not just regurgitating chunks of text or keeping them on library shelves but taking them to your own voice and in that act declaring a perspective on them.

In quoting, words and voice by necessity interfuse. Text takes on the voice s of its users as they reframe it in the recontextualised moment, whether as speakers, readers, creators, transmitters, audiences. Quoting above all melds voice and word. In quoting we sound not just our own voices but those that went before, sometimes far distant, sometimes nearby but still with that stance of looking in on us from outside and in turn being regarded and answered back.

Whether or not we are fully aware of it — for it may be only the gentlest of echoes — quoting calls the external and distant into the immediate moment. Through quoting we sing a co-created polyphony of words and voices that are ours and not ours, past and not-past, mingling while standing back, both presence and beyond presence.

Kaye, 'A Liberal peer is as useful as a fifth wheel to a coach, and as ornamental as whitewash. Wolff has illustrated this point by a series of experiments on the sunflower, of which we shall quote one. However and whatever to quote Amy again , the intentions were that brought the crowd, the Norwood place was comfortably filled.

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Idioms about quote. Origin of quote —; —85 for def. Words nearby quote quota sampling , quota system , quotation , quotation mark , quotation marks , quote , quoted company , quote-driven , quote-unquote , quoteworthy , quoth. What is a basic definition of quote? Quote also means to offer something as evidence or supporting facts. Where does quote come from? Did you know How is quote used in real life?

Try using quote! To quote something means to paraphrase it and give a short summary of its meaning. Words related to quote cite , name , recall , adduce , attest , detail , excerpt , extract , instance , paraphrase , parrot , proclaim , recite , recollect , reference , retell.