“I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself.”
Marlene Dietrich

Quotations are an invaluable resource for the language classroom. As texts, they are short, autonomous in meaning, thought provoking, memorable and easy to obtain. In the old days, I used to get mine from the book shown below.

Unlike other references I have seen, the quotations in the Collins book are categorised according to subject rather than author. This allowed me to select a few thought-provoking, memorable examples and design a lesson based around a theme (money, religion, language, famous last words, war, etc).

Naturally, online resources are now more convenient. Here are two that I recommend:

Quotationsbook.com
Quotationspage.com

The advantage of such sites over paper formats is that they are equipped with search windows. As well as allowing us to look in the database for a specific author or theme (as mentioned above), this invaluable tool also allows us to find quotations that contain a common grammatical or lexical feature. Consider the following:

“If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” Florynce Kennedy
“If everyone on earth just stopped breathing for an hour, the greenhouse effect would no longer be a problem.” Jerry Adler
“If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” Voltaire
“If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.” Charles Dickens
“If I had no sense of humour, I would long ago have committed suicide.” Muhatma Ghandi
“If women didn’t exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning.” Aristotle Onassis
“If God lived on earth, people would break his windows.” Jewish proverb
“If life was fair, Elvis would be alive and all the impersonators would be dead.” Jimmy Carson

By typing “if would” into the search window of Quotationsbook.com, I was given over 5000 quotations all of which contained these key words. It took me approximately 20 minutes to select, copy and paste onto a word document the 8 examples of the structure which we fondly refer to as the ’second conditional’.

I used these 8 examples to prepare a lesson for a class of Spanish students. Although some of the quotations will be culturally unsuitable for other groups of learners, I am including the lesson plan in order to demonstrate what I did with them.

second-conditional-quotations.pdf

Like the Amazon website, a quotations site can be thought of as Learner Friendly Corpus in that:

1. It is a familiar or user-friendly online database of language.
2. It contains a search facility.
3. It can be used to obtain examples of English which contain specific grammar or lexis for use in the classroom.

Although we can use sites like these to plan lessons, it is equally important that we make our learners aware of them. In doing this, we are equipping them with the tools they need for self-study. For example, show your students how to use a quotation site and at the end of the lesson, give them a small list of words to take home (items that have arisen during the class, for example). For each word or item, each learner should find a quotation they like that contains it for the next day.