When I first learned about block quotes in some classroom — long enough ago that I don't remember which one — I felt very unsettled. Supposing you wrote on 8½" paper, and had inch margins. Then the width of your text is 6½". If you indent by an inch on each side for a block quote, you go down to 4½". But if what you were quoting itself contained a block quote, you would need to go down to 2½". In no time at all, this process would be forced to terminate; there was a very small limit to how many layers of quotation you could go deep before the construct of the block quote gave out. It was not infinitely expressive, and that felt like a betrayal of the promise of the written word







