Someone — Cyril Connolly? Ezra Pound? — once said that anything that can be read twice is literature; I would say that anything that bears saying twice is quotable. – Joseph Epstein, “Quotatious,” A Line Out for a Walk: Familiar Essays, 1991

A true quotation cannot be divorced from the character who uttered or scribbled it; it should say as much about the person quoted as about the particular subject referred to, and for this reason an anthology of quotations should be a kind of portrait gallery. – Robert Andrews, The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations, “Introduction”

Most anthologists of quotations are like those who eat cherries or oysters; first picking the best ones and winding up by eating everything. – Sebastian Roch Nicolas Chamfort