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This serves two purposes: 1) it sets up your point/argument by telling the reader why you're bringing up a particular source or quote, and 2) it gives the reader information to help identify the speaker or place the speaker or example in the given work. For example, a quote from Catullus' "Lesbia, Let Us Live Only for Loving" could be introduced in the following manner:

As an aristocratic Roman, Catullus was well aware of the power of money.  Thus he aligns it with love by using its language, "penny," "bankrupt," and "assets," to convey his disdain for financial capital over the charms of his lover (2, 11).

Context helps readers 1) by making the reader think "Oh yeah, now I remember that part" and 2) by letting readers better understand (and thus agree with) your argument by framing it in a manner so they can understand it. Here, it's clear that the writer wants to accentuate the idea of the importance of money and connect it to the strength of Catullus’ feelings toward Lesbia. The sentence leading up to the quote does this by planting the word "aristocratic" and “money” in the reader's mind, which is then reflected in the quotes.  By setting up your example so clearly, your argument flows logically from example to the explanation, leaving the reader with a satisfied "Ahhh" as opposed to a befuddled "huh?"

 Verb List

Two items on this page: a list of verbs to incorporate into sentences with quotes and a list of sentences including sources.

Use both as tools to help you work quotes into your own prose.

Use a verb from the following list when introducing outside sources and then commenting on them. It can also come in handy when providing context for quotes from the work your writing about.

What follows are a series of sentences which successfully incorporate quotes from poems. Below that are sentences which incorporate quotes from an outside source.

Review these to get a sense of the rhythm and cadence involved in setting up a quote and how the verb list above can help "launch" a quote. 

For Sappho love is tied to pain. As she notes in "Throned in Splendor," it is an "affliction" that leaves her with a "tortured heart" (15, 18).

The gods in Sappho's poetry are familiar beings, more human than divine. After hailing her, almost like a cabbie, Aphrodite "Swiftly" comes and asks the speaker "what beyond all else I would have befall my / tortured heart" (17-18).

The concubine emasculates her lover, associating him with a "doll" and a "mirror," two objects that evoke the feminine (12,13).

The latent hostility in the speaker of "Mothers" is seen right from the opening of the poem:

You stand against the pillar
of my hut and ask:
Where is your son?
I don't really know. (1-4)

Instead of an answer, the mother rejects the speaker's question . . .

Li Po uses the seasons to signify the passing of time and the emotion associated with it. Instead of saying months have gone by, the speaker in "A Poem of Changgan" says "And the first autumn wind added fallen leaves" (22).

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From the beginning of the text, Bradford sets the Puritans apart from others. He writes that "many became enlightened by the Word of God and had their ignorance and sins discovered" (157). Separating the "enlightened" from what seems to be the unenlightened makes a clear "us v. them" distinction.

The power of O'Connor's "The Revelation" is derived from its moral tenacity. As the writer Joyce Carol Oates observes, the story "questions the very foundations of our assumptions of the ethical life" (52). Since Mrs. Turpin's "foundation" was based upon a shallow and limited view of religion, she was ripe for a fall.

Although some critics argue that surrealism began in 1924 after the publication of the Surrealist Manifesto by Andre Breton (Kershner 52), Kafka's work, published a decade earlier, shares many qualities of surrealist art, and should be considered a precursor to the later movement.

The critics David Boxer and Cassandra Phillips also note Carver's seeming lack of style. They write that "what seems to be casual talk, virtually empty of communication, is really very deliberately and finely wrought" (99). This emphasis on the craft of his fiction -- it is "deliberately and finely wrought" -- underscores the nature of Carver's oxymoronic talent: he made conversation seem so natural that it seems to merely record what is being said.

As Dickens wrote in an essay published in the same decade as Hard Times, "It is probable that nothing will ever root out from among the common people an innate love they have for dramatic entertainment in some form or other" (305-306). That Lousia and Tom, members of the upper-class, would also find amusement in the circus shows that the differences between classes -- between people -- is not as well defined as we would think.

F. R. Leavis argues that the circus performers are symbols of "human spontaneity" (344). As such, they operate according to emotions rather than from the slow and measured intellect of Gradgrind.

Mitchell Domhnal notes that "some critics allege that to read Dickinson in any standard typographic edition is effectively to read her in translation." This suggests that the usual method of reading a poem in a textbook isn't the best way to read Dickinson .

Leypoldt Gunter argues that there are "two types of Carver stor[ies]," with one being realistic and the other more experimental (320).

© David Bordelon 2015