Quotable
An adjective describing a phrase, person, or work that lends itself naturally to being quoted.
To call a speaker, writer, or line 'quotable' is to say it is unusually well-shaped for repetition. Quotable lines tend to share a small set of traits: brevity, sharp rhythm, vivid imagery, a memorable turn, and the ability to make sense out of context.
Some writers actively cultivate quotability. Oscar Wilde, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Joan Didion all produced sentences that lift cleanly out of their paragraphs. Others — Marcel Proust, Henry James, Cormac McCarthy — write at lengths that resist extraction, even when the prose is extraordinary.
Quotability is not a sign of depth, but it is a sign of craft. The line that travels is the line that was tuned to travel.
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Keep reading the glossary
A short, sharp statement that compresses a truth or observation into a single line.
A short, witty, often satirical statement built on a clever turn.
A short, vivid extract from a longer speech, designed to be repeated by news media.
The convention of citing only the author's name when quoting in casual writing.