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

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

Books of quotation are not only of importance to the reader for what they contain of matured thought, but also for what they suggest. Our brains receive the spark and become luminous, like inflammable material by the contact of flint and steel. – Maturin M. Ballou, January 1886, preface to Edge-Tools of Speech

An anthology of quotations is a museum of utterances. – Gary Saul Morson, The Words of Others: From Quotations to Culture, 2011