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.

An anthology of quotations is a museum of utterances.

Reframing an extract as a quotation constitutes a kind of coauthorship. With no change in wording, the cited passage becomes different. I imagine that the thrill of making an anthology includes the opportunity to become such a coauthor.

A single gnomic line can come to resonate with centuries of subsequent wisdom.

Unless created as freestanding works, quotations resemble "found" art. They are analogous, say, to a piece of driftwood identified as formally interesting enough to be displayed in an art museum or to a weapon moved from an anthropological to an artistic display.... The presenter of found art, whether material or verbal, has become a sort of artist. He has not made the object, but he has made it as art.

People who rarely read long books, or even short stories, still appreciate the greatest examples of the shortest literary genres. I have long been fascinated by these short genres. They seem to lie just where my heart is, somewhere between literature and philosophy.

The attribution of a speaker is in fact a part of the quotation. Some statements simply are better if a certain famous person said them.