For I often please myself with the fancy, now that I may have saved from oblivion the only striking passage in a whole volume, and now that I may have attracted notice to a writer undeservedly forgotten. – Samuel Taylor Coleridge

But I have long thought that if you knew a column of advertisements by heart, you could achieve unexpected felicities with them. You can get a happy quotation anywhere if you have the eye. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., 1923, quoted in Holmes-Laski Letters: The Correspond

An inveterate quote plucker is what I have become. – Elaine Bernstein Partnow, preface to The Quotable Woman: From Eve to 1799, 1985

It should be a pleasure to the appreciative reader, while recognizing their beauty, to cull these flowers of thought for the benefit of those who, less fortunate than himself, have not the time to indulge in literary pleasures. – Maturin M. Ballou, January 1886, preface to Edge-Tools of Speech