Lately i've been thinking about how the quotes you post on the blog don't typically come with a source, which is very frustrating for some of them, considering how bizarre/intriguing/interest-piquing a lot of them tend to be. I'm curious, what is the idea with that :p? You're killing us here!
Fair question!
A lot of the fun of the #quotes, for me, involves the effects that "presenting a text on its own, out of context" can have on the way that text feels to the reader, or what it appears to mean.
What makes something a good candidate for the #quotes tag is not simply that it's funny or weird, but that it becomes funnier or weirder (or "interestingly different" in some other way) when presented out of context.
A high-quality #quote (by my standards) will often send the reader off on this mental journey in which they struggle to come up with some hypothetical context that would make sense of the text, and the conjectures that seem most natural are also fairly bizarre / puzzling / funny / etc., often much moreso than the actual context from which I extracted the text.
The seemingly trivial act of presenting the quote in isolation has a surprising amount of "creative power." It can conjure up these strange, often hilarious hypothetical worlds that the reader would never have thought about if they'd seen the text in its original form -- but which are nonetheless "latent within the text" in some sense, since they can be "conjured" from that text in such a simple manner.
I think these effects get diluted a lot if there's a citation alongside the text. Even if you don't actually look up the source, it's hard to stop your eyes from scanning over the citation immediately after (or before) you read the text, and the information contained in an unambiguous citation is typically enough to dramatically constrain the range of possible contexts, thereby closing off many of those entertaining "worlds" before you have the chance to get a mental glimpse of them.
Anyway -- if you ever want to know the source of any particular #quote, you can ask me and I'll tell you.
