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:

Using quotations appropriately (MLA)

Using the ellipsis mark to limit quoted material (MLA)

Using brackets to make quotations clear (MLA)

Indenting long quotations (MLA)

Using signal phrases to integrate sources (MLA)