After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations. – H.L. Mencken, about Shakespeare

The man whose book is filled with quotations, may be said to creep along the shore of authors, as if he were afraid to trust himself to the free compass of reasoning. – Quoted unattributed in The Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure, April 1

They have written volumes out of which a couplet of verse, a period in prose, may cling to the rock of ages, as a shell that survives a deluge. – Edward Bulwer Lytton

I have drag-netted the ocean, as well as the numerous narrow streams and wide rivers of literature… – Frank J. Wilstach, A Dictionary of Similes, 1916