When quoting, the in-text citation appears right after the closed quotation marks and the period follows the citation itself.
Indeed, the myth of the West that we have come to know is that which “we have come to know from American movies” (Kuester 281).
If the quoted portion doesn’t end the sentence, put the in-text citation right after the quote and continue on with your sentence:
Essentially, in Volkswagen Blues imaginative colonization is achieved “through physical reappropriation of the continent” (Weisman 491) in that Jack and La Grande Sauterelle first follow the routes of the French explorers along the Mississippi River before setting out along the Oregon Trail.
The information in the in-text citation only needs to be information that is not made clear in the text itself. For example, in MLA format the in-text citation normally contains that author’s last name and the page number for the quote. However, if the page number or the author’s name is mentioned within the text itself, you do not need to repeat that information in the parentheses:
The term historiographic metafiction was coined by Linda Hutcheon in A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction in which Hutcheon defines historiographic metafiction as pertaining to “those well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages” (5).
For quotes within quotes, use the double quotation marks to indicate the beginning and end of the quoted text as a whole and apostrophes to indicate the quote within the quote:
This irony is something that Harry’s friend, Rachel Gold, draws our attention to: “‘And you’re a Canadian, Harry. So why is a Canadian so concerned about teaching Americans how to be American?’” (Vanderhaeghe 181).
Here the entire quote is spoken text from within the novel itself. So, the double quotation marks and the apostrophes are all lumped together. Also, you’ll notice that the quote itself ends with a question mark that appears inside the quotation marks and that the period that marks the end of your sentence still comes after the citation itself.
Quotes longer than three lines need to be blocked off:
While in the previous examples, the use of imaginative colonization was more about a reclaiming of the genre of the Western rather than the Western frontier itself, Volkswagen Blues uses the aforementioned intertextuality along with a physical movement across the United States as a means of doing both. Essentially, the
spatial journey diagonally across the United States is…doubled by a textual journey covering a number of Canadian and American literary intertexts. Jack Waterman’s journey parallel’s the pioneer’s quest for the American dream, and the novel echoes this search as it is represented in the American intertexts that compose it (Miraglia 49, emphasis in original).
I can’t do it on the blog, but the whole quote itself would be indented, not just the first line, and the whole thing would be double-spaced.
As you’ll also notice in these examples, the quotes are always introduced by the text itself. So, you should try to find ways to integrate your quotes rather than “bomb-dropping” them into your text.