The Art of Quotation (Part IV)

Jill Lepore (Photo by Stephanie Mitchell)

Jill Lepore, in her superb “The Shorebird” (The New Yorker, March 26, 2018; included in her 2023 collection The Deadline), makes an interesting move. Quoting from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, she uses the first line as an introduction to the rest of the excerpt. Here’s the passage:

Everything is connected to everything else, she showed. “We poison the caddis flies in a stream and the salmon runs dwindle and die,” Carson wrote:

We poison the gnats in a lake and the poison travels from link to link of the food chain and soon the birds of the lake margins become its victims. We spray our elms and the following springs are silent of robin song, not because we sprayed the robins directly but because the poison traveled, step by step, through the now familiar elm-leaf-earthworm cycle. These are matters of record, observable, part of the visible world around us. They reflect the web of life—or death—that scientists know as ecology.

The result is a neat in-sentence-block-quotation combo.