How to Do Quotations:
You must use at least three quotations from THE THINGS THEY CARRIED. One of the quotations must be embedded; the other one must be a block quotation.
Example of embedded quotation:
Tim O’Brien believes that the men were not operating from courage but rather from a deep-seated fear of shame. He states,”They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide….” This fear of losing face in front of their soldier-brothers was perhaps the “heaviest burden of all…” for it was a burden that one could never put down and that required “perfect balance and posture.”
How to use quotations within quotations:
O’Brien’s character Rat Kiley “listened for a time, then shook his head.’Man, you must be deaf. She’s already gone.’”
To show a quotation within a quotation, you use a single quotation mark to set off the quotation within the quotation. Then when you are finished with the larger quotation, you use the regular two quotation marks.
David Lee quotes from Shakespeare when he writes in his daily column that “everyone should abide by their own inner law and ‘to thy own self be true.’”
Block quotation:
O’Brien writes:
They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die.
Grief, terror, love, longing – these
were intangibles, but the intangibles
had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight.
(page 21)
From this powerful quotation we learn that this is where O’Brien gets the title of his book.
If the quotation is longer than three lines, you must use block quotations.
For block quotations, you must skip a line from the paragraph, indent 12 spaces and use single space. Do not use quotations marks in a block quotation.
To cite the quotation simply put the page number in parentheses. (page 429)
