15 Examples of Quotes


A verbatim quote it is a form of content borrowing that serves to make it clear to the reader that what is being said is someone else’s words. This action is called refer, and it allows the reader to know when he reads an author and when he reads the texts that that author investigated, and it also provides information keys so that he can go to the original book to continue deepening.

Whenever we take an idea that has already been published and use it, or that we investigate to give rise to our own ideas, we must account for where everything comes from and differentiate what is our own from what is foreign. Otherwise, we will be incurring a plagiarism, a form of intellectual dishonesty that can lead to penalties and problems. Plagiarism is a form of theft.

Both the textual citations and the final bibliography of a text are prepared following standardized methodological models. The best known are APA (American Psychological Association) and MLA (from English: Association of Modern Languages).

Types of textual citation

  • Short quotes (less than 40 words). They must be incorporated into the text, without interrupting its flow or its layout. They must be enclosed in quotation marks (which mark the beginning and end of the original text), accompanied by a reference in the with the bibliographic data of the citation:
    • Year of publication of the book. This is particularly important if there are multiple books cited by the same author, as they can be distinguished by year.
    • Number of the page (s) cited. Usually preceded by the abbreviation “p.” or “p.” In the case of several pages, the first and last will be cited, separated by a short dash: pp. 12-16. In case of being separate but discontinuous pages, commas will be used: pp. 12, 16.
    • Author’s last name. In some cases, if the surname has been named before the citation or it is clear to whom it belongs, this information may be omitted in the parentheses.
  • Long quotes (40 words or more). Long citations should be placed in a separate paragraph, separated from the left margin of the page with two (2) tabs without indentation and one point less in the font size. In this case, quotation marks of any kind are not required, but after the appointment your reference must be included with the aforementioned data.

Special signs

In both cases of textual citation, some of the following signs, abbreviations or characters may appear:

  • Brackets []. The appearance in the middle of a short or long quotation of a text in brackets usually means that the text between them is not part of the quotation, but belongs to the researcher, who is forced to clarify something or add something to it so that can be fully understood.
  • Ibid. or ibid. Expression in Latin that means “identical” and that is used in the reference to tell the reader that a textual quotation belongs to the same book previously cited.
  • cit. This Latin phrase means “cited work” and is used in cases where there is only one consulted work by an author, thus avoiding repeating its details (since they are always identical), only varying the page number.
  • Et. to the. This Latin abbreviation is used for the cases of works with a main author and numerous collaborators, too many to be listed in its entirety. Therefore, the surname of the principal is cited and is accompanied by this abbreviation.
  • Ellipsis (…). They are used to indicate to the reader that there is part of the omitted text, either before the start of the quote, after it, or in the middle of it. They are usually used in parentheses.

Examples of short quotes

  1. As we can see in the investigations of Foucault (2001), the notion of madness is an integral part of reason, since “there is no civilization without madness” (p. 45).
  2. Furthermore, “cultural consumption in Latin America reaches its maximum degree in relation to the flow of political and commercial discourses, and not, as in Europe, articulated from nation-states” (Jorrinsky, 2015, p. 8).
  3. In this sense, it is convenient to go to psychoanalysis: “The doctrine of being manifests itself as a result of introjection [castración] of language in the individual ”(Tournier, 2000, p. 13).
  4. This is what Elena Vinelli affirms in her foreword to the work Elena Vinelli, when she affirms that “It is the sociocultural construction of genders that differentiates the feminine subjectivity from the masculine one” (2000, p. 5), giving us to understand the feminist semblance that underlies the novel by Sara Gallardo.
  5. Not much more is to be expected from these investigations, except “the brief disappointment of finding the unsuspected truth” as stated by Evers (2005, p.12) in his famous research journal.

Long textual citation examples

  1. Thus, we can read in Gallardo’s novel (2000):

… But women always pass in groups. I hid and waited. La Mauricia passed by with her jug ​​and I dragged her away. Every day afterwards she ran away to find me, trembling with fear of her husband, sometimes early and sometimes late, to that place that I know. In the house that I made by my hand, to live with my wife, in the mission of the Norwegian gringo she lives with her husband. (p. 57)

  1. To this it is convenient to contrast the vision of the French author:

In universal religions, such as Christianity and Buddhism, dread and nausea prelude escapes from a fiery spiritual life. Now, this spiritual life, which is based on the reinforcement of the first prohibitions, nevertheless has the meaning of the party … (Bataille, 2001, p. 54)

  1. Writing constitutes a meeting and disagreement point for the most positive and romantic views around the literary fact, being able to serve for distinctions such as those made by Sontag (2000):

Here is the big difference between reading and writing. Reading is a vocation, a trade in which, with practice, one is destined to become more and more expert. As a writer, what one accumulates are first of all uncertainties and anxieties. (p. 7)

  1. This concept of “becoming” can be found scattered throughout the philosopher’s work. However, its clarification seems to be a complicated matter:

Becoming is never imitating, or doing like, or adapting to a model, be it that of justice or truth. There is never a term to start from, or to reach or to reach. Nor two terms that are interchanged. The question what is your life? It is particularly stupid, since as someone becomes, what they become changes as much as he (…) The binary machines are over: question-answer, male-female, man-animal, etc. (Deleuze, 1980, p. 6)

  1. Thus, in the correspondence between Freud and Albert Einstein, it is possible to read the following:

… You are much younger than I am, and I can hope that by the time you reach my age you will be among my ‘supporters’. Since I will not be in this world to prove it, I can only anticipate that satisfaction now. You know what I think now: “Proudly anticipating such a high honor, I enjoy now …” [Esto es una cita del Fausto de Goethe] (1932, p. 5).

Paraphrase or verbatim quote?

The paraphrase is the reinterpretation of a foreign text, expressed in the words of the new author. In this case, a researcher reads the ideas of another author and then explains them in his own words, without ceasing to attribute the authorship to whom it corresponds.

In some cases, the name of the author is paraphrased in parentheses to clarify that the ideas are not their own.

A textual quotation, on the other hand, is a loan from the original text, in which the referenced text is not intervened or modified at all. In both cases, the authorship of the original text is respected: plagiarism is never a valid option.

Examples of paraphrases

  1. As has been said in many books on quantum physics, the absolute laws of the universe with which modern man sought to explore and understand it, turn out to be much more flexible and relative (Einstein, 1960) than previously assumed.
  2. It is not, however, that the new national ideals come from the most conservative wing of society, but rather that it plays a paradoxical alternative role in Latin America today in the face of left-wing populisms (Vargas Llosa, 2006) that besieged it. during the so-called “long decade”.
  3. It should be noted that, however, sometimes a thing is a thing and nothing more (Freud, cit.), so it is convenient to know how to abort the psychoanalytic interpretation of art in time, before falling into biographical determinism.
  4. The anthropological trends of Southeast Asia, as many anthropologists have already pointed out, contain elements of minority cultural transit that make it attractive for visitors from a hegemonic culture (Coites et. Al., 1980), but not for its local neighbors. .
  5. In addition, Bataille has been clear in this regard, distancing his position from the typical mortuary fascination of post-Romantics, opposing work as ordering and repression to the fascination for violence (Bataille, 2001).
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