From Loretta:
I have a book due soon, and my brain, which is thinking as hard as it can about that one thing, begs to be excused from thinking about anything else. That is why today I’m letting others do my thinking for me, in the form of quotations. You're invited to join the quote fest.
“Tim had made shift to live many years by writing novels, at the rate of five pounds a volume; but that branch of business is now engrossed by female authors, who publish merely for the propagation of virtue, with so much ease and spirit, and delicacy, and knowledge of the human heart, and all in the serene tranquillity of high life, that the reader is not only inchanted by their genius, but reformed by their morality.”
A guy wrote that. The guy is Tobias Smollett and the quotation comes from THE EXPEDITION OF HUMPHRY CLINKER, which, some of you may recall (though I can’t imagine why) was one of the books I never got around to reading (the blog is One of these days). I finally did get around to it, and it’s a delightful book. Though I am more in sympathy with Samuel Johnson regarding remuneration--“Sir, no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money”--and I’ve a constitutional aversion to using books to reform anybody, I think Smollett was certainly right about women’s “knowledge of the human heart.” He had many apt things to say about this, that, and the other thing. For instance, “A man may be very entertaining and instructive on paper...and exceedingly dull in common discourse.” That’s my thinking. If I could talk entertainingly, I wouldn’t need to write. Not that this is what I wish for. What I wish for is to be a quotable writer. In the meantime...
How about this little Smollett gem: “truly, she has got a languishing eye, and reads romances.”
If this tempts you to try the book, I strongly urge you to spring for the Norton Critical Edition, which is very nicely annotated. Otherwise, you’ll feel as though you are reading a language you learned in junior high school and haven’t used since. And that, BTW, is something I stole--er, I mean, am quoting from somebody or other (a Wench, could it be?).
Which brings me to this from Robert Benchley: “Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author’s soul. If that upheaval is not present, then it must come from the works of any other author which happen to be handy and easily adapted.”
My current WIP, YOUR SCANDALOUS WAYS, has many quotations.
Because Byron was in Venice about the time of my story, and because he has such delicious things to say about men and women and their relationships, I’ve used quotations from his poetry at the start of each chapter. Too, now and again my characters will quote somebody. This is a way, among other things, to indicate that H/H have similar tastes in books or music or to show a deeper understanding of an issue. Some quotations I’ve used because they’re so apt that nothing else will do. And some because, well, I love them so much that I just want to share them
Here’s a chapter quotation, from BEPPO:
For glances beget ogles, ogles sighs,
Sighs wishes, wishes words, and words a letter,
Which flies on wings of light-heel’d Mercuries
And then, God knows what mischief may arise
When love links two young people in one fetter,
Vile assignations, and adulterous beds,
Elopements, broken vows and hearts and heads.
I quote from DON JUAN as well, which is very accommodating in that way, being so looooooong and loaded with great stuff. You’ll find quotations from that poem in 
LORD OF SCOUNDRELS (reissue coming in December) as well.
I have lots of quotations to share, not all sublime. Many are ridiculous, but they are favorites, some decades old. There was the Salada Tea Bag: “If it weren’t for Venetian blinds, it’d be curtains for all of us.” There are other authors. Dickens, of course. Oscar Wilde. I could go on and on but that would get pretty boring, since it’s all one person’s taste.
So I ask you to take a turn and share quotations from your collection. Sublime? Ridiculous? In between? It can come from a Great Work, a fortune cookie, your Uncle Albert.
Maybe I’ll steal it and use it somewhere.