ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses the odd circumstance of speaking in quotation marks, from the double-finger-squeeze gesture on the podium to the unexpected voices of John Keats's oracular urn and Edgar Allan Poe's uncannily iterative raven. The book offers an additional and complementary ways of understanding the 'quotation marks' of the title. It argues that a sequel or prequel implicitly places quotation marks around the so-called 'original', changing it in important and unforeseeable ways. Wisdom was a form and a genre, as well as a mode of judgment or knowledge. The book explores language and cultures are always in quotation marks. It explores the function of quotation marks, visible and invisible, in framing, conveying, resisting, or querying such wisdom or wisdoms.
