"To be amused at what you read - that is the great spring of quotation"
About this Quote
Amusement isn’t just a pleasant side effect of reading; Montague frames it as the hidden engine that turns private sentences into public currency. Calling it “the great spring of quotation” is a sly piece of mechanics: quotation doesn’t run on reverence, it runs on recoil, delight, recognition. We repeat lines not because they’re true in some abstract sense, but because they trigger an immediate, bodily response: a laugh, a wince, a sharp “exactly.” That jolt is what makes a sentence portable.
Montague, a journalist by trade, understood that writing competes in a noisy marketplace of attention. His subtext is mildly corrective to the pious view of reading as self-improvement. The reader isn’t a dutiful student; the reader is a collector of small shocks. Amusement here isn’t mere comedy, either. It can mean being piqued, charmed, scandalized, morally stirred - any reaction strong enough to make you want to carry the line into your next conversation.
The context matters: early 20th-century print culture was dense with essays, speeches, serialized fiction, and the kind of quotable aphorism that traveled through newspapers and drawing rooms. Montague is describing an older version of what we now call shareability. Before screenshots and retweets, the “spring” was memory and social performance: you quoted to entertain, to signal taste, to land a point with borrowed elegance. His intent is pragmatic, almost editorial: if you want your words to live, write the kind that someone is pleased to steal.
Montague, a journalist by trade, understood that writing competes in a noisy marketplace of attention. His subtext is mildly corrective to the pious view of reading as self-improvement. The reader isn’t a dutiful student; the reader is a collector of small shocks. Amusement here isn’t mere comedy, either. It can mean being piqued, charmed, scandalized, morally stirred - any reaction strong enough to make you want to carry the line into your next conversation.
The context matters: early 20th-century print culture was dense with essays, speeches, serialized fiction, and the kind of quotable aphorism that traveled through newspapers and drawing rooms. Montague is describing an older version of what we now call shareability. Before screenshots and retweets, the “spring” was memory and social performance: you quoted to entertain, to signal taste, to land a point with borrowed elegance. His intent is pragmatic, almost editorial: if you want your words to live, write the kind that someone is pleased to steal.
Quote Details
| Topic | Book |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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