See these websites for "quotation experts" — writers and editors devoted to finding the origins of familiar quotations. Search this Guide Search. Finding Quotations. Quotation Experts When you are attempting to verify or find a quotation, it is possible that someone has already done the research for you.
The Oxford Dictionaries blog includes several articles she has written about researching quotations. If it's a long quote, choose a phrase and put it in quotations. Try it outside quotations. Choose fairly unusual keywords to search. Put in or leave out the name of the person you suspect to have said it. A HarvardKey available to current Harvard faculty, staff and students only is needed for these links.
Check your local library to see if you have access to any of these they may recommend others. Remember to evaluate your source. Some sites just repeat information found in other places rather than confirming it for themselves. Google Books Advanced Book Search — surround the full quote with quotations marks, or specify author and then keywords Other Digital Libraries These are similar to Google Books and you can search across the full text of millions of books.
There is a lot of overlapping content, but there are some unique items and each of them searches a little differently so you may get different results. These are 3 of the largest:.
Wikiquote is Wikipedia for quotes. As with Wikipedia, pay attention to cited sources. Unfortunately, the material may not exist online, or it may not be possible to find it because the quote is not exact or has been misattributed for so long. In observance of Veterans Day there will be limited virtual reference services Thursday, November If you're experiencing an ongoing technical issue when you attempt to access library materials with your HarvardKey, please report it to Library Technology Services.
Sometimes, you should quote short fragments, rather than whole sentences. Suppose you interviewed Jane Doe about her reaction to John F. She commented:. It was just unreal and so sad. It was just unbelievable. I had never experienced such denial.
Perhaps it was because JFK was more to me than a president. He represented the hopes of young people everywhere. You might instead want to quote Jane when she arrives at the ultimate reason for her strong emotions:.
Jane Doe grappled with grief and disbelief. Quoting the words of others carries a big responsibility. Misquoting misrepresents the ideas of others. John Adams did, in fact, write the above words. But if you see those words in context, the meaning changes entirely. Without religion, this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in public company—I mean hell.
This example is from Paul F. Boller, Jr. There may be times when you need to quote long passages. However, you should use block quotations only when you fear that omitting any words will destroy the integrity of the passage. If that passage exceeds four lines some sources say five , then set it off as a block quotation. Be sure you are handling block quotes correctly in papers for different academic disciplines—check the index of the citation style guide you are using.
Here are a few general tips for setting off your block quotations:. After reading several doctrinally rigid tracts, John Adams recalled the zealous ranting of his former teacher, Joseph Cleverly, and minister, Lemuel Bryant. He expressed his ambivalence toward religion in an letter to Thomas Jefferson:.
It can be confusing when you start combining quotation marks with other punctuation marks. You should consult a style manual for complicated situations, but the following two rules apply to most cases:.
In the above example, both the comma and period were enclosed in the quotation marks. The main exception to this rule involves the use of internal citations, which always precede the last period of the sentence. For example:. Note, however, that the period remains inside the quotation marks when your citation style involves superscript footnotes or endnotes.
In the first example, the author placed the exclamation point outside the quotation mark because she added it herself to emphasize the outrageous nature of the parking price change. The original note had not included an exclamation mark. In the second example, the exclamation mark remains within the quotation mark because it is indicating the excited tone in which the coach yelled the command.
Thus, the exclamation mark is considered to be part of the original quotation. If you are quoting a passage that contains a quotation, then you use single quotation marks for the internal quotation.
Quite rarely, you quote a passage that has a quotation within a quotation. In that rare instance, you would use double quotation marks for the second internal quotation.
Whenever you want to leave out material from within a quotation, you need to use an ellipsis, which is a series of three periods, each of which should be preceded and followed by a space. So, an ellipsis in this sentence would look like. There are a few rules to follow when using ellipses:.
For example, using the above example, you would NOT need an ellipsis in either of these situations:.
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