Only the use of footnotes enables historians to make their texts not monologues but conversations, in which modern scholars, their predecessors, and their subjects all take part. – Anthony Grafton (b.1950), The Footnote: A Curious History, “Epilogue: Some Concl

Quotation brings to many people one of the intensest joys of living…. This innocent vanity often helps us over the hard places in life; it gives us a warm little glow against the coldness of the world and keeps us snug and happy. – Bernard Darwin, May 1941, introduction to The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations

…though many a gatherer has carried his basket through these diamond districts of the mind… – William Rounseville Alger, “The Utility and the Futility of Aphorisms,” The Atla

Life itself is a quotation. – Jorge Luis Borges