Quotation Marks Within Quotes & Sayings

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

LIBERATION LEADS TO LIBERATION. These are the first words of truth - not truth in quotation marks but truth in the real meaning of the word; truth which is not merely theoretical, not simply a word, but truth that can be realized in practice. The meaning behind these words may be explained as follows: By liberation is meant the liberation which is the aim of all schools, all religions, at all times. This liberation can indeed be very great. All men desire it and strive after it. But it cannot be attained without the first liberation, a lesser liberation. The great liberation is liberation from influences outside us. The lesser liberation is liberation from influences within us. — G.I. Gurdjieff

I'm a great believer in the direct quote in quotation marks and the hard fact. — Andrew Marr

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

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

The Short Stories of Nikolai Gogol. "For Gogol Ganguli," it says on the front endpaper in his father's tranquil hand, in red ballpoint ink, the letters rising gradually, optimistically, on the diagonal toward the upper right-hand corner of the page. "The man who gave you his name, from the man who gave you your name" is written within quotation marks. — Jhumpa Lahiri

Quotations introduced by that are regarded as in indirect discourse and not enclosed in quotation marks. — William Strunk Jr.

Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written (in the usual sense of this opposition), as a small or large unity, can be cited, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion. This does not suppose that the mark is valid outside its context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center of absolute anchoring. This citationality, duplication, or duplicity, this iterability of the mark is not an accident or anomaly, but is that (normal/abnormal) without which a mark could no longer even have a so-called "normal" functioning. What would a mark be that one could not cite? And whose origin could not be lost on the way? — Jacques Derrida

If you use a colloquialism or a slang word or phrase, simply use it; do not draw attention to it by enclosing it in quotation marks. To do so is to put on airs, as though you were inviting the reader to join you in a select society of those who know better. — William Strunk Jr.

Liberals dispute that Reagan won the Cold War on the basis of their capacity to put mocking quotation marks around the word, won. That's pretty much the full argument: Restate a factual proposition with sneering quote marks. — Ann Coulter

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

It is an old error of man to forget to put quotation marks where he borrows from a woman's brain! — Anna Garlin Spencer

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

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

And I promise myself then, in that moment, that I will hold him forever, just like this, until all the pain and torture and suffering is gone, until he's given a chance to live the kind of life where no one can wound him this deeply ever again.
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.
It's time, I think, to break free. — Tahereh Mafi

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

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

As with other paired bracketing devices (such as parentheses, dashes and quotation marks), there is actual mental cruelty involved , incidentally, in opening up a pair of commas and then neglecting to deliver the closing one. The reader hears the first shoe drop and then strains in agony to hear the second. In dramatic terms, it's like putting a gun on the mantelpiece in Act I and then having the heroine drown herself quietly offstage in the bath during the interval. It's just not cricket. Take the example, 'The Highland Terrier is the cutest, and perhaps the best of all dog species.' Sensitive people trained to listen for the second comma (after 'best') find themselves quite stranded by that kind of thing. They feel cheated and giddy. In very bad cases, they fall over. — Lynne Truss

Most of all I like "bad" lines, that is those considered bad, in my opinion unjustly, by theory. The reason for the last quotation marks is that most so-called theory is only a collection of examples from master practice. — Bent Larsen

The forms of direct-half-hidden and completely hidden quoting were endlessly varied, as were the forms for framing quotations by a context, forms of intonational quotation marks, varying degrees of alienation or assimilation of another's quoted word. And here the problem frequently arises: is the author quoting with reverence or on the contrary with irony, with a smirk? Double entendre as regards the other's word was often deliberate. — Mikhail Bakhtin

Or take a vacation. Everywhere in America is pretty much the same, and I don't recommend going overseas, not with the way the world regards us. It's just not safe now, safe being one of those words like free or clean or sincere that can never be said without the invisible quotation marks anymore, but still. You should get away. — Dave Mountain

Only the "intercourse' part." Miranda makes quotation marks with her fingers. "Why do they call it intercourse anyway? It makes it sound like it's some kind of conversation. Which it isn't. It's penetration, pure and simple. There's no give-and-take involved."
"It's an act of war," Miranda objects, getting heated.
"The penis is saying, "Let me in,' and the vagina is saying, "Get the hell away from me, creep. — Candace Bushnell

There is no way you can use the word "reality" without quotation marks around it. — Joseph Campbell

... in the latter half of the twentieth century, postmodernism upended everything. Universal truths were no longer accepted. "Truth" (postmodernism loves quotation marks) was instead a social construct that depended heavily on cultural context. Nothing was either true or false, but was instead open to interpretation. — Gudjon Bergmann

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

Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor. — H.L. Mencken

There is no fiercer enemy than a word. A word that can be written down in pages and punctuated by quotation marks and commas and spelled out in contracts and poems and sighs, in old whispers and song lyrics, in promises and vows. — Alice Hoffman

Let us being again. To take some examples: why should "literature" still designate that which already breaks away from literature - away from what has always been conceived and signified under that name - or that which, not merely escaping literature, implacably destroys it? (Posed in these terms, the question would already be caught in the assurance of a certain fore-knowledge: can "what has always been conceived and signified under that name" be considered fundamentally homogeneous, univocal, or nonconflictual?) To take other examples: what historical and strategic function should henceforth be assigned to the quotation marks, whether visible or invisible, which transform this into a "book," or which still make the deconstruction of philosophy into a "philosophical discourse"? — Jacques Derrida

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

When speaking aloud, you punctuate constantly - with body language.
Your listener hears commas, dashes, question marks, exclamation points, quotation marks as you shout, whisper, pause, wave your arms, roll your eyes, wrinkle your brow.
In writing, punctuation plays the role of body language. It helps readers hear the way you want to be heard. — Russell Baker

I was the type who looked at discussions of What Is Truth only with a view toward correcting the manuscript. If you were to quote "I am that I am," for example, I thought that the fundamental problem was where to put the comma, inside the quotation marks or outside. — Umberto Eco

A few words which he wanted to emphasize were put into brackets or set off by quotation marks. My first impulse was to point out to him that it was ridiculous to put slang words and expressions between quotation marks, for that prevents them from entering the language. But I decided not to. When I received his letters, his parentheses made me shudder. At first, it was a shudder of slight shame, disagreeable. Later (and now, when I reread them) the shudder was the same, but I know, by some indefinable, imperceptible change, that it is a shudder of love- it is both poignant and delightful, perhaps because of the memory of the word shame that accompanied it in the beginning. Those parentheses and quotation marks are the flaw on the hip, the beauty mark on the thigh whereby my friend showed that he was himself, irreplaceable, and that he was wounded. — Jean Genet

A pawn in a very complicated game, a little cog in a huge gear, so little that it should not even be seen: in fact, it was established that I would go through here without leaving any traces; and instead, every minute I spend here I am leaving more traces. I leave traces if I do not speak with anyone, since I stick out as a man who won't open his mouth; I leave traces if I speak with someone because every word spoken is a word that remains and can crop up again later, with quotation marks or without. Perhaps this is why the author piles supposition on supposition in long paragraphs without dialogue, a thick, opaque layer of lead where I may pass unnoticed, disappear.
I am not at all the sort of person who attracts attention, I am an anonymous presence against an even more anonymous background. — Italo Calvino

Avoid overuse of 'quotation "marks."' — William Safire

The functional disenchantment, the sweet habit of each other, had begun to put lines around her mouth, lines that looked like quotation marks
as if everything she said had already been said before ... [the cat] was accustomed to much nestling and appreciation and drips from the faucet, though sometimes she would vanish outside, and they would not see her for days, only to spy her later, in the yard, dirty and matted, chomping a vole or eating old snow. — Lorrie Moore

Authors hide their big thefts by putting small ones between quotation marks. — Paul Eldridge