Gary Saul Morson Quotes & Sayings

Not everything that can be extracted appears in anthologies of quotations, in commonplace books, or on the back of Celestial Seasonings boxes. Only certain sorts of extracts become quotations. — Gary Saul Morson

Unless created as freestanding works, quotations resemble "found" art. They are analogous, say, to a piece of driftwood identified as formally interesting enough to be displayed in an art museum or to a weapon moved from an anthropological to an artistic display ... The presenter of found art, whether material or verbal, has become a sort of artist. He has not made the object, but he has made it as art. — Gary Saul Morson

A single gnomic line can come to resonate with centuries of subsequent wisdom. — Gary Saul Morson

Anatole France frankly advised, "When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it." Yes, indeed, but do more. Copy many well-said things. Pierce them together. Assimilate them. Make the process of reading them a way to form the mind and shape the soul. As anthologies can never be complete, we will never exhaust the ways quotations can enrich our lives. — Gary Saul Morson

We sometimes think of quotations as extracts from larger texts, but some quotations originated complete unto themselves. — Gary Saul Morson

The attribution of a speaker is in fact a part of the quotation. Some statements simply are better if a certain famous person said them. — Gary Saul Morson

An anthology of quotations is a museum of utterances. — Gary Saul Morson

Some lines are born quotations, some are made quotations, and some have "quotation" thrust upon them. — Gary Saul Morson

I wonder if "an" ever occurs before "haughty" except in a quotation, or whether you can make anything sound like a quotation by adding a word like "goeth"? — Gary Saul Morson

Reframing an extract as a quotation constitutes a kind of coauthorship. With no change in wording, the cited passage becomes different. I imagine that the thrill of making an anthology includes the opportunity to become such a coauthor. — Gary Saul Morson

People who rarely read long books, or even short stories, still appreciate the greatest examples of the shortest literary genres. I have long been fascinated by these short genres. They seem to lie just where my heart is, somewhere between literature and philosophy. — Gary Saul Morson