These words refer to short supporting passages from a longer work or another person or to brief evaluations cited in praise or blame. Quotation specifically refers to a passage from another source, clearly indicated as such; it suggests an exact word-for-word rendering of what the other person said: failing to make clear in his text what was summary and what quotation of his opponent’s argument. Brevity is usually but not necessarily an implication of this word: justifying his viewpoint by extensive quotations from his source material. Quotation can apply to only a few words; extract and excerpt , in contrast, suggest longer passage from another source. Extract usually refers to several lines of a paragraph, especially when these are set off from the text in which they are cited by the use of indentation or smaller type: concluding his review with a twenty-line extract from the title poem. Excerpt can mean much the same, but is used also to suggest a longer passage still and may be presented in and for itself, without comment: Several magazines published excerpts from his novel.

Blurb and quote are much more informal terms than the other words here considered. Blurb refers to commendatory words that are cited on the dust-jacket of a book or in advertisements for a play or film. A blurb may consist of or include quotations from critics or be an entirely anonymous account designed to persuade a customer to read or see the work. The word is often used pejoratively to refer to the extravagant and insincere praise common in such writing: a blurb comparing the author to Homer and Shakespeare. Quote is a slangy-sounding shortened form of quotation , used in much the same way as the more formal word. Its natural context is the field of journalism, where it suggests a brief comment by someone who has permitted its publication, either with or without attribution: Reporters were telephoning every firefighting official for a quote on the bushfire crisis.