Depending on its length, you may incorporate a quotation into your text by enclosing it in quotation marks or by setting it off from your text in a block without quotation marks. In either case, be sure to integrate the quotation into your essay using the strategies described here:

In-Text Quotations Incorporate brief quotations (three lines or fewer of prose or poetry) into your text. You may place a quotation virtually anywhere in your sentence:

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At the Beginning

“To live a life is not to cross a field,” Sutherland, quoting Pasternak, writes at the beginning of her narrative (11).

In the Middle

Woolf begins and ends by speaking of the need of the woman writer to have “money and a room of her own” (4)--an idea that certainly spoke to Plath’s condition.

At the End

In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir describes such an experience as one in which the girl “becomes an object, and she sees herself as object” (378).

Divided by Your Own Words

“Science usually prefers the literal to the nonliteral term,” Kinneavy writes, “--that is, figures of speech are often out of place in science” (177).

When you quote poetry within your text, use a slash ( / ) with spaces before and after to signal the end of each line of verse:

Alluding to St. Augustine’s distinction between the City of God and the Earthly City, Lowell writes that “much against my will / I left the City of God where [faith] belongs” (4-5).

Block Quotations In MLA style, use the block form for prose quotations of four or more typed lines. Indent the quotation half an inch from the left margin, as shown in the following example:

In “A Literary Legacy from Dunbar to Baraka,” Margaret Walker says of Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s dialect poems:

He realized that the white world in the United States tolerated his literary genius only because of his “jingles in a broken tongue,” and they found the old “darky” tales and speech amusing and within the vein of folklore into which they wished to classify all Negro life. This troubled Dunbar because he realized that white America was denigrating him as a writer and as a man. (70)

In APA style, use block form for quotations of forty words or more. As in MLA style, indent the block quotation half an inch.

In a block quotation, double-space between lines just as you do in your text. Do not enclose the passage within quotation marks. Use a colon to introduce a block quotation unless the context calls for another punctuation mark or none at all. When quoting a single paragraph or part of one in MLA style, do not indent the first line of the quotation more than the rest. In quoting two or more paragraphs, indent the first line of each paragraph an extra quarter inch. If you are using APA style, indent the first line of subsequent paragraphs in the block quotation an additional half inch from the indention of the block quotation.

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Note that in MLA style the parenthetical page reference follows the period in block quotations.