Creating a context for quotations

When you quote the words of a narrator, speaker, or character in a literary work, you should name who is speaking and provide a context for the quoted words. In the following example, the quoted dialogue is from Tennessee Williams’s play The Glass Menagerie:

Laura is so completely under Amanda’s spell that when urged to make a wish on the moon, she asks, “What shall I wish for, Mother?” (1.5.140).

Here, a passage is quoted from Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery”:

When a neighbor suggests that the lottery should be abandoned, Old Man Warner responds, “There’s always been a lottery” (284).

Related topics:

Limiting your use of quotations

Using the ellipsis mark to limit quoted material

Using brackets to make quotations clear

Indenting long quotations

Using signal phrases to integrate sources