Why this need to pick out other people's words? Our own words never satisfy and infinite claims are laid upon them. Other people's words are always a find - you take them as they are, knowing that you can neither improve nor change them. Other people's words express our thoughts inexactly and as if from afar, like a discovered formula hit upon after a long search. Hence the fascination of epigraphs and quotations.

-Lidia Ginzburg, "Iz starykh zapisei." in 'O Starom i novom'