Quotations Weblog

It took us a couple of days past the end of the month, but we have officially added 1000 new quotations to the website. I would like to take a moment and thank the following people for making this possible:

• The writing team of Animal Crossing: Wild World for making that video game so incredibly funny and quotable.

• Chuck Palahniuk for writing the incredibly quotable Invisible Monsters.

• All the people who contributed quotations to our Contribute A Quotation section during December 2005 to February 2006. That’s how backlogged we are going through that list, but there were some of you out there who really know how to contribute a quote.

Adding 1000 quotations to our website was a lofty goal, but we were able to achieve it with only a couple extra days. Next time we do this, it will be during a month where there are no holidays and no travel plans. Until then, enjoy our collections!

We’re about halfway through the month and about halfway through our goal. There is a big Thanksgiving weekend coming up and I really don’t want to be typing quotations on Turkey Day, so I’ve got to pick up the pace a little bit. Here are some of the best quotes I’ve added to the collection recently:

As you can see, I’ve found even more quotations from the game Animal Crossing: Wild World. There should be a literary award for video games. This one was written so well, they deserve a Newbery, if you ask me.

Venture capitalist and business blogger Guy Kawasaki has an entertaining 10-question interview with Jon Winokur. Jon is the author of The Portable Curmudgeon, one of the first quotation books I ever purchased.

• 10 Questions with Jon Winokur: How to Heighten Your Sense of the Absurd

Read it for Winokur’s thoughts on arrogance, humor, quotations, Republicans, and the French, and a sampling of his favorite quotes. He even mentions our site and calls it “one of the better ones,” which I found flattering—Jon’s books are one of the things that inspired me to create this site in the first place. Granted, it’s in the middle of a paragraph about his preference for using anything but quotation websites as sources, but we’ll take whatever compliment we can get from a curmudgeon.

Many of our readers have collections of their own and would like to give us quotes that we are missing from our website. We appreciate all submissions so much that we have set up a form to use to submit quotations. You can find it here:

• The Quotations Page: Contribute a Quotation

In case you’re thinking about adding quotations using our Contributed Quotations form, here are some tips that will ensure that your quote gets added:

• Spelling counts: If the quote you have added is misspelled or is lacking punctuation, it will not be considered. If we have to proof-read your submission, it will be deleted, not added to the collection.

• Include the author: If you type I don’t know, unknown or anonymous in the author field, we won’t even look at your submission. If you don’t know the author, it’s just a pretty thought, not a quotation.

• Don’t quote yourself: If you are quoting yourself, it’s not a quote, it’s publication. We won’t consider adding submissions that are self-quotes.

• Don’t quote bumper stickers: I know they’re witty, but they fall into the category of unknown authors. We want attributions.

• Include the source: Including the book, movie, website, etc. where you got the quote greatly improves the odds that it will be chosen to add to the collection.

• Unique sources are a plus: If you quote a video game, a webcomic, a comic book or television show with the author’s name and the source, you are almost guaranteed to have the quotation added to the collection. We are always on the lookout for unique quotes. You’ll even get extra bonus points for additional information like television episode, URL or series number.

We have a three-tiered system to our quotations collections. The collections that you see are added personally by Mike and I. The contributed quotes sit in a file until one of the two of us goes through it and either approves or deletes it. When a contributed quotation is approved, it doesn’t get added to our collection, only the Contributed Quotations collection, which is only searchable with extra effort. After a quote has been in the Contributed Quotations collection for a while, we will eventually add it to ours. We go through this process to preserve accuracy and even then, we get things wrong.

If you find a quotation that is incorrect, please tell us. It’s really easy to do. Each quote has its own page and there is a link for each one where you can email us. Click on the sentence: “Notice an error or discrepancy? Send us a comment about this quotation,” and we will be able to correct the quote.

Thank you to all of the people who have entered their favorite quotations into our Contributed Quotations collection. We appreciate your dedication to your favorite thoughts.

Over the last few days, we have added a bunch of quotations to the collection. In addition to the quotations from Animal Crossing, we’ve added a bunch more. Here are some of our favorites:

I LOVE quotes from video games. Thank you to the person who suggested this last quotation, even though you didn’t state the true author’s name, I was able to track it down and add it to our collection.