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Ellipses and Other Emendations of Quotations

First, read the website Writing Review page on Ellipses, then work on the sentences below. What could be more fun!

1. Here's a line from Virginia Woolf's "The Mark on the Wall." Notice that it already includes ellipses. Choose only part of it to include in a quotation. Write an introductory tag for it and embed it in such a way that you distinguish her ellipses from you own.

"The tree outside the window taps very gently on the pane . . . . I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle" (3).

2. Here are the opening sentences of Flaubert's "A Simple Heart." Devise an introductory tag for this quotation that signals one of its salient analytical devices, then imbed it in such a way that you change its past tense to your analytical present tense.

"For fifty years the ladies of Pont-l'Évêque envied Madame Aubain her servant Felicity. For a hundred francs a year she cooked, and cleaned, sewed, washed, ironed, could harness a horse, fatten up poultry, churn butter; and she remained loyal to her mistress who, all the same, was not an agreeable person" (1).

3. Here are some lines from Wordsworth's "Lines Composed Above Tintern Abbey" describing the sublime mood. Devise an introductory tag, embed the quotation, removing some of the words and showing the emendation with ellipses. Don't forget virgules. Don't neglect to change the first person plural into your own point of view—third person.

"that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul" (41-46).

4. Here are the opening sentences of Kingston's memoirs The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. Devise an introductory tag that will allow you to leave the quote in first person point of view.

"You must not tell anyone," my mother said, "What I am about to tell you. In China your father had a sister who killed herself. She jumped into the family well. We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born" (1).

5. Here are the opening lines of Pushkin's "The Queen of Spades." Devise an introductory tag and amend the quotation to indicate that "they" refers to the aristocrats of St. Petersburg.

"They were playing cards at the house of Narumov, an officer in the Horse Guards" (1).

End.