…the curious hunter-up of rare quotations… the young and struggling scribbler… – William Francis Henry King, “Introduction,” Classical and Foreign Quotations, 18

I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made. – Samuel Johnson, quoted in The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Joh

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

It is probably to Talleyrand, that Receiver-General of waif wit and estray epigram, that more sayings have been wrongly attributed than to any other modern. – William Mathews, “Quotation and Misquotation,” in North American Review, January