I've been working on a Walter Benjamin-esque project for quite a while, without ever realizing that it was such. For me, the appeal of quotations is, primarily, divorced from attribution - it's the ability of a line or paragraph to capture what Allen Mandelbaum once described as the asymmetric thrust of a mind in motion. This is, obviously, idiosyncratic, but my criteria are simply: does this make me see something familiar in a new way, or does it help clarify and give shape to something I've felt or believed, albeit vaguely. The secondary appeal of quotations, and the Benjamin-esque approach, does tie back to attribution, but neither for credibility nor subtext. Instead, it's an opportunity to create a conversation out of juxtaposition, a Rashamon-like approach to see how different individuals have thought about and grappled with similar issues. For instance:
It is very difficult to reduce to obedience anyone who does not seek to command (Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin & Foundations of Inequality Among Men)
The great paradox of public life is that leadership requires conformity (Salaita, An Honest Living)
Or:
Happy in danger in a dangerous place / Yourself another self you found at Troy (Logue, All Day Permanent Red)
But this is it now this is the mud of Troy (Oswald, Memorial)
Or:
[T]he march, the burden, the desert, the boredom and the anger (Rimbaud, A Season in Hell)
Travel, he will discover, is no cure for an identity crisis (Tussman, The Burden of Office: Agamemnon and Other Losers)
I also realize the irony of saying that some of the appeal of quotations is divorced from attribution, then immediately following this with an attributed quote. Then again, consistency is over-rated
I've been working on a Walter Benjamin-esque project for quite a while, without ever realizing that it was such. For me, the appeal of quotations is, primarily, divorced from attribution - it's the ability of a line or paragraph to capture what Allen Mandelbaum once described as the asymmetric thrust of a mind in motion. This is, obviously, idiosyncratic, but my criteria are simply: does this make me see something familiar in a new way, or does it help clarify and give shape to something I've felt or believed, albeit vaguely. The secondary appeal of quotations, and the Benjamin-esque approach, does tie back to attribution, but neither for credibility nor subtext. Instead, it's an opportunity to create a conversation out of juxtaposition, a Rashamon-like approach to see how different individuals have thought about and grappled with similar issues. For instance:
It is very difficult to reduce to obedience anyone who does not seek to command (Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin & Foundations of Inequality Among Men)
The great paradox of public life is that leadership requires conformity (Salaita, An Honest Living)
Or:
Happy in danger in a dangerous place / Yourself another self you found at Troy (Logue, All Day Permanent Red)
But this is it now this is the mud of Troy (Oswald, Memorial)
Or:
[T]he march, the burden, the desert, the boredom and the anger (Rimbaud, A Season in Hell)
Travel, he will discover, is no cure for an identity crisis (Tussman, The Burden of Office: Agamemnon and Other Losers)
Etc. etc.
I also realize the irony of saying that some of the appeal of quotations is divorced from attribution, then immediately following this with an attributed quote. Then again, consistency is over-rated