LibAnswers: MLA FAQs

According to the Purdue OWL MLA guide, a block quote is a long quote from your source that is "more than four lines of prose or three lines of verse". Start a block quote on a new line with no quotation marks, and indent it 1/2 inch from the left-margin, still double-spaced. The parenthetical citation goes after the end of the quote, after the punctuation mark. Keep the original line breaks when quoting verse("MLA Formatting Quotations").

Example: 

Payne contextualizes the history and attitudes of America's mental institutionalization:

For more than half the nation's history, vast mental hospitals were prominent architectural features on the American landscape. Practically every state could claim to have at least one. The catalyst for their creation was the schoolteacher-turned-reformer Dorothea Dix (1802-1887), who, beginning in the early 1840s, traveled the country lobbying states to build hospitals for the proper care of the "indigent insane". Dix's humanitarian appeals were persuasive, and they were well-timed: expansionist America was eager to erect large civic institutions that would serve as models of an enlightened society. Public schools, universities, prisons, and insane asylums were all part of this agenda, though high-minded rhetoric was not always matched by the less-than-altruistic motives of politicians. (Payne 7)

For more information: https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/mla_style/mla_formatting_and_style_guide/mla_formatting_quotations.html

Works Cited

"MLA Formatting Quotations." The Purdue OWL, The Writing Lab and OWL at Purdue and Purdue U, 2022, https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/mla_style/mla_formatting_and_style_guide/mla_formatting_quotations.html. Accessed 20 Mar. 2023.

Payne, Christopher. Asylum : Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals, MIT Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/linfield/detail.action?docID=3339090.