Goodreads Quote Page
Crowd-sourced quotation databases that spread text quickly and sources slowly.
Goodreads and similar user-contributed quotation sites host millions of quotations submitted by readers and ranked by likes. They are among the most visited quotation resources in the world and the first result for most quotation searches.
Their structural weakness is that submissions are attributed but not sourced. A quotation is tagged with an author and often a book title, with no page, edition or verification step, and popularity ranking then promotes the most appealing version rather than the accurate one.
This produces a predictable pattern: paraphrases displace originals, lines migrate between authors of similar reputation, and quotations invented for social media acquire book titles they never appeared in.
Practical rule: use these sites as a search index, never as a citation. Take the wording, find the named book in a full-text source, confirm the sentence, then cite the book — and if the sentence is not there, do not use the quotation.
“Search Goodreads → find claimed title → confirm in Google Books or the actual edition → cite page → publish.”
Keep reading the glossary
The process of tracing a quotation to its earliest reliable source before publishing it.
The way large quotation databases launder unverified attributions into apparent fact.
Assigning a quote to the wrong person — the most common error in quotation.
A research tradition (and a well-known website) devoted to tracing the true origin of famous quotations.