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One of the hardest writing techniques to learn and remember is how to quote a quote—yes, quote is one of those words that’s both a verb (“Can I quote you on that?”) and a noun (“I’m learning how to correctly punctuate quotes.”). There are so many rules for quoting quotes that it can be hard to keep track of them all. How do you “run in” a quote? What’s a block quotation? When does punctuation go inside quotation marks, and when should it be placed outside? Do quotes ever not need quotation marks? What are the rules for how to cite a quote? In this post, we’ll answer these questions and more, so you can quote quotes with confidence.

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How to Quote a Brief Passage

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If you intend to quote a short passage in your writing, you’ll want to format it as a run-in quotation. Run-in quotes are always enclosed in quotation marks, and whether punctuation appears inside or outside the quotation marks depends on the punctuation: periods and commas go inside the quotation marks, and question marks and exclamation points that aren’t original to the quoted material appear outside the quotation marks.

  • Virginia Woolf says that when learning to write, “it is impossible to read too much.”
  • One of the most famous lines in modern theater is from A Streetcar Named Desire, when Stanley yells, “Stella! Stella!”
  • Who was it who said, “A stitch in time saves nine”?

How to Quote a Longer Passage

Longer quotes, usually six to eight or more complete sentences, are called block quotations. To set them off from the rest of the text, you should begin block quotations on their own line and indent them half an inch. Unlike run-in quotations, block quotations are not enclosed in quotation marks. If you’re wondering whether you should quote a quote as a run-in or block quotation, a good rule of thumb is that if the quote is longer than one hundred words (or more than one paragraph or stanza), you should probably set it off as a block quotation.

Here’s an example:

In his essay “Why I Write,” George Orwell describes the difficult process every writer faces when writing a book:

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed.

Other Types of Quotes and How to Format Them

How to format run-in and block quotes is easy to learn with practice, but throw different types of quotes into the mix, and things get complicated again.

Quoting poetry

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When you’re quoting poetry, it’s best to set off a quote of two or more lines as a block quotation (remember that block quotations don’t take quotation marks).

Billy Collins’s poem “Introduction to Poetry” begins

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light

like a color slide.

If you run a short poetry quotation of no more than two lines into the text, the quote should be enclosed in quotation marks, and the line break should be indicated with a slash with a space on each side.

A few lines later, Collins’s poem continues with “I say drop a mouse into a poem / and watch him probe his way out,” an interesting use of imagery to describe the experience of studying poetry.

Quote within a quote

There are different rules for quotes within run-in quotations and quotes within block quotations.

Because run-in quotes are enclosed in double quotation marks, a quote within a quote takes single quotation marks.

  • The humor in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland thrives on statements of the obvious, such as this quote from chapter 12: “‘Begin at the beginning,’ the King said gravely, ‘and go on till you come to the end: then stop.’”

In contrast, because block quotes are not enclosed in quotation marks, a quote within a quote takes double quotation marks.

  • The humor in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland thrives on statements of the obvious, such as this passage from chapter 12:

The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. “Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?” he asked.

“Begin at the beginning,” the King said gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”

Quoting dialogue

Quoting dialogue can be tricky, but as it usually involves more than one paragraph, it’s best formatted as a block quotation. When block quotations contain several paragraphs, the paragraphs should retain the paragraph indents of the original material. As explained above, though block quotations don’t take quotation marks, dialogue within the block quote should be enclosed in double quotation marks.

  • In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen effectively implies Elizabeth’s initial dislike for Mr. Darcy through conversations such as the following, which takes place during a dance:

“What think you of books?” said he, smiling.

“Books—oh! no. I am sure we never read the same, or not with the same feelings.”

“I am sorry you think so; but if that be the case, there can at least be no want of subject. We may compare our different opinions.”

“No—I cannot talk of books in a ball-room; my head is always full of something else.”

Likewise, when you’re quoting dialogue from plays, such as Shakespeare’s verse dialogue, quotes should be formatted similarly to poetry.

Romeo’s unfailing optimism is frequently emphasized in his conversations with Juliet.

JULIET. O think’st thou we shall ever meet again?

ROMEO. I doubt it not; and all these woes shall serve

For sweet discourses in our time to come.

Commas or Colons?

Should you introduce quotes with commas or colons? As you’ve probably already noticed in our examples, it depends on the sentence’s structure.

If the introductory phrase is not a complete sentence, use a comma before the quote.

  • At the beginning of Moby-Dick, the narrator says, “Call me Ishmael.”

If the quote follows an independent clause (a complete sentence), use a colon.

  • This is how Moby-Dick begins: “Call me Ishmael.”

If the quote fits into the sentence syntactically, don’t use a comma or a colon.

  • In the first line of Moby-Dick, the narrator tells us to call him “Ishmael.”

Quotations and Capitalization

Similar to using commas or colons with quotes, whether a quote begins with a capital or lowercase letter depends on the sentence structure, regardless of the capitalization in the original quote.

When to start a quote with a lowercase letter

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For both run-in and block quotations, when a quote functions as a syntactical part of the sentence, it should begin with a lowercase letter.

  • In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens’s statement that the story takes place during both “the best of times” and “the worst of times” establishes a theme of contrast that will appear throughout the book.

When to start a quote with a capital letter

For both run-in and block quotations, when the quote is not syntactically essential, the first letter may be capitalized.

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  • The opening line of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” alerts readers to watch for contrasts in the book.

Using Square Brackets in Quotes

If you’re trying to quote a quote but it doesn’t fit into the syntax of your sentence, what do you do? This is where square brackets come to the rescue: they allow you to change a word or two to make the quote fit into a sentence.

  • In the first line of Moby-Dick, the narrator tells us to “call [him] Ishmael.”

Quotes and Ellipses

An ellipsis generally indicates a word or several words have been removed from quoted material. How to quote a quote using ellipses is a complicated discussion, and different style guides have quite different rules. We at Elite most often use Chicago style when we’re editing, so that’s what we’ll use here to explain when, where, and if ellipses should appear in quotes.

At the beginning

You should almost never use an ellipsis at the beginning of a quote, even if you’ve removed the entire beginning of the sentence.

At the end

Similarly, an ellipsis at the end of a quote is rarely necessary, even if you’ve removed most of the end of the sentence. Only use an ellipsis is the sentence is deliberately grammatically incomplete.

In the middle

When you remove words from the middle of sentences or paragraphs, that’s when you’ll use an ellipsis.

Pro Tip! We at Elite suggest that you use the ellipsis character (…) rather than three spaced periods in a row ( . . . ). This ensures that your ellipsis will remain properly formatted on any computer or in any font.

When you remove one or more words from the middle of a sentence, use a three-dot ellipsis; when you remove the end of a sentence or the beginning of the next sentence, use a three-dot ellipsis after a period. The following passage is from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby:

  • There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides.

Here’s how to use ellipses to shorten the above passage:

  • There was so much to read.…I bought a dozen volumes…and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint.…And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides.

In poetry

When you remove words in poetry, the ellipsis rules are a bit different. If you remove a few words, follow the ellipsis guidelines above. If you remove an entire line or several lines from a poem, use a line of widely spaced dots approximately the same length as the preceding line. Here’s an example from Robert Frost’s poem “Birches”:

  • When I see birches bend…

Across the lines of straighter darker trees,

I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

How to Cite a Quote

Similar to the rules for ellipses, how to cite a quote depends largely on which style guide you’re using. So when you’re deciding how to cite a quote in your writing, you should use the citation style that’s most relevant to your field (or, if you’re a student, the style guide your teacher stipulates). Whatever style guide you use, the most important thing is to cite your sources as clearly and thoroughly as possible.

Parenthetical citations and punctuation

One aspect of citation that’s largely consistent across citation styles is where parenthetical citations appear in a quote. Keep in mind that in run-in quotes, the sentence’s terminal punctuation should appear after the parenthetical citation, but in block quotes, this is reversed, and the parenthetical citation should appear outside the terminal punctuation.

Straight or Curly Quotes?

We’ve talked about everything from how to quote short and long passages to how to cite a quote to how to punctuate quotes in various contexts, but you have one more punctuation decision to make: Should you use straight or curly quotes with your quotations? Usually, either is fine, and all we can really say here is that one of the keys to excellent writing is consistency—so whichever type of quotation marks you use, stick with it throughout your piece!

Conclusion

As we’ve mentioned throughout this post, learning how to format quotations takes practice. But once you’ve learned the rules, you’ll be able to use quotations effectively to support and clarify your writing.

In this posting you will find my selection of the very best 60 quotes, from nearly a decade of collecting them. They range from the profound to the intriguing to the just plain funny.

One way or the other, you’ll surely find many of them to be thought-provoking and entertaining.

This selection is, of course, based solely on my personal taste (and even that varies largely from day to day according to my mood). You are welcome to browse the entire collection and look for your own favorite ones or contribute new quotes from your own personal collection.

Wisdom Quotes

2. Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
3. The richest man is not he who has the most, but he who needs the least.
4. You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.
5. Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear.
6. You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
7. When hungry, eat your rice; when tired, close your eyes. Fools may laugh at me, but wise men will know what I mean.
8. The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.
9. To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail.
10. We are what we repeatedly do; excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
11. A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends.
12. Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought.
13. Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.
14. Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.
15. What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do.
16. The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes.
17. Work like you don’t need money, love like you’ve never been hurt, and dance like no one’s watching
18. Try a thing you haven’t done three times. Once, to get over the fear of doing it. Twice, to learn how to do it. And a third time, to figure out whether you like it or not.
19. Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.
20. People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.

Funny Quotes

21. Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children and no theories.
22. What the world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few of us left.
23. Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
24. I’ve gone into hundreds of [fortune-teller’s parlors], and have been told thousands of things, but nobody ever told me I was a policewoman getting ready to arrest her.
25. When you go into court you are putting your fate into the hands of twelve people who weren’t smart enough to get out of jury duty.
26. Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.
27. Just the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
28. My pessimism extends to the point of even suspecting the sincerity of the pessimists.
29. Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world.

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30. I quit therapy because my analyst was trying to help me behind my back.
31. We’ve heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true.
32. If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions?
33. If the lessons of history teach us anything it is that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
34. When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. Now I’m beginning to believe it.
35. Laughing at our mistakes can lengthen our own life. Laughing at someone else’s can shorten it.
36. There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbors will say.
37. There’s so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?
38. All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.
39. I don’t mind what Congress does, as long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses.
40. I took a speed reading course and read ‘War and Peace’ in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.

Otherwise Intelligent Quotes

41. The person who reads too much and uses his brain too little will fall into lazy habits of thinking.
42. Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.
43. It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
44. I’d rather live with a good question than a bad answer.
45. We learn something every day, and lots of times it’s that what we learned the day before was wrong.
46. I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.
47. Don’t ever wrestle with a pig. You’ll both get dirty, but the pig will enjoy it.
Quotes
48. An inventor is simply a fellow who doesn’t take his education too seriously.
49. Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.
50. Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
51. Never be afraid to laugh at yourself, after all, you could be missing out on the joke of the century.
52. I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it.
53. Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.
54. The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
55. Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.
56. Some people like my advice so much that they frame it upon the wall instead of using it.
57. The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.
58. Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence.
59. Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not, and a sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is.
60. When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him.

Help! How to Better Manage my Unwieldy Collection of Quotes?

After I first published my favorite quotes collection (along with its companion article 5 Reasons to Collect Favorite Quotes), it grew faster than ever from 400 to over 500 quotes.

Nowadays, I’m much more demanding about which quotes to add to my collection. However — judging from the number of quotes I find on the web on a daily basis — I can only expect it to grow even faster than before.

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Years ago, I faced the same situation with my browser bookmarks. Even being extremely conservative about adding them, after years they inevitably started adding up to the point of being unmanageable. Cleaning and categorizing those bookmarks was both time-consuming and inefficient.

The problem was eventually solved not by tidying them up regularly, but by the smart use of tagging and searching technology. Now my bookmarks are online at del.icio.us, tagged and fully searchable — and I still have ways to own the data. (Call me paranoid, but I don’t feel comfortable relying entirely on a third party to hold years of data, no matter how much I like their service.)

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Now I feel I need a similar solution for my quotes — having a long flat list isn’t working very well anymore. At first, Quotiki seemed like a perfect fit. Unfortunately, however, there’s currently no way to export my quotes or otherwise retain ownership of the data.

So, here’s the question to my smart readers: How do you think I should go with my quotes collection? Do you have any suggestions of online services I can use and still retain my collection while making it more useful to myself and to others?

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