PROSE (Death of a Salesman)
The primary difference between quoting prose and verse is the lines and how they appear in your paper. In
prose, you simply type the words into your paper, without concern for how they are formatted in the text.
Quote within a paragraph (less than 4 lines)
Alcee is obviously dishonest, as shown when he writes to his wife and offers to remain
apart from her longer, “…realizing that [her] health and pleasure were the first things to
be considered” (Chopin 99).
Quote within a quote (less than 4 lines)
Alcee obviously wants to remind Calixta about their past when he asks, “’Do you
remember – in Assumption, Calixta?’ he asked in a low voice broken by passion”
(Chopin 97).
Quote within a paragraph (4 lines or more)
Like the narrator from “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator from “Greasy Lake” is, at least
at the beginning of the story, a victim of his own delusions. He sees himself as
something that, obviously, he is not:
We were all dangerous characters then. We wore torn-up leather jackets,
slouched around with toothpicks in our mouths, sniffed glue and ether and what
somebody claimed was cocaine. When we wheeled our parents’ whining station
wagons out onto the street we left a patch of rubber half a block long. We drank
gin and grape juice, Tango, Thunderbird, and Bali Hai. We were nineteen. We
were bad (Boyle 112).
NOTE: In determining whether or not a quote is “4 lines or more” the deciding factor is NOT how the
lines appear in the TEXT, but rather how they appear in your PAPER.
VERSE (Macbeth)
When quoting lines of verse in a paper, you MUST pay attention to how the words and lines are formatted
in the text itself. You must preserve the integrity of the lines and line breaks. You do this by inserting a
forward slash between lines, when quoting verse in a prose paragraph.
Quote of less than 4 lines:
Lady Macbeth displays her evil clearly when she says, “But Screw your courage to the
sticking-place, / And we’ll not fail” (I.vii.59-60).
Quote of 4 lines or more:
Macbeth shows the lengths to which his evil goes when he decides to kill Macduff’s
family:
The castle of Macduff I will surprise;
Seize upon Fife; give to th’ edge o’ th’ sword
His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls
That trace him in his line. No boasting like a fool;
This deed I’ll do before this purpose cool (IV.i.150-154).
NOTE: The deciding factor in the case of quoting verse as to whether a quote is “4 lines or more” is the
number of lines IN THE TEXT. In other words, if you quote 4 or more lines from the text, then the lines
appear in your paper in block quote format, regardless of how many “lines” the quoted material would
occupy if typed in prose format.