You could compile, I should think, the worst book in the world entirely out of selecting passages from the best writers in the world. – G.K. Chesterton, “On Writing Badly”

Not everything that can be extracted appears in anthologies of quotations, in commonplace books, or on the back of Celestial Seasonings boxes. Only certain sorts of extracts become quotations. – Gary Saul Morson, The Words of Others: From Quotations to Culture, 2011

We sometimes think of quotations as extracts from larger texts, but some quotations originated complete unto themselves. – Gary Saul Morson, The Words of Others: From Quotations to Culture, 2011