winged lines

If a writer is to avoid oblivion and to live on, it will be on the wings of quote marks.

two-way street

One can only hold the critic to account when he quotes from the text on which he expounds.

be quoted or die

Literary fame is measured by being oft-quoted.

worthy writer

When I come across a passage worth quoting, I’m content to be a scribe.

first to mine

In the course of one's reading, it's nice to think, even if it’s not true, that I’ve been first to mine this gemstone quotation.

words equal to life

A passage achieves quotation when there’s an equation between its words and experience.

different readers, alternate lines

Reading his commonplace book, I discovered we had read many of the same books, yet lines he had chosen to quote I’d passed over without notice.

prickly

A text prickly with quotable passages.

boatload of quotes

When he was working on his study of German tragedy, he boasted a collection of “over 600 quotations very systematically and clearly arranged”; like the later notebooks, this collection was more than an accumulation of excerpts intended to facilitate the writing of the study but constituted the main work, with the writing as something secondary. The main work consisted in tearing fragments out of their context and arranging them afresh in such a way that they illustrated one another and were able to prove their raison d’être in a free-floating state, as it were. It definitely was a sort of surrealistic montage. Benjamin’s idea of producing a work consisting entirely of quotations, one that was mounted so masterfully that it could dispense with any accompanying text, may strike one as whimsical in the extreme and self-destructive to boot, but it was not, any more than were the contemporaneous surrealistic experiments which arose from similar impulses.

--Hannah Arendt, introduction to Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (Schocken Books, 1969)