Punctuating quotations

Students get confused about punctuating quotations. For in-text quotations, the rules of American usage are fairly simple: commas and periods go inside the quotation marks （by convention rather than for any rational reason）, and all other punctuation marks go outside. If, however, these other punctuation marks are part of the original quotation, then you put them inside the quotation marks.

　　If, as is usually the case, a parenthetical citation follows the quotation, it generally goes inside the terminal punctuation. Here's an original passage and various possibilities in quoting from it:

SOURCE

　　At this point I cannot suppress a sigh and a last hope. What is it that I especially find utterly unendurable? That I cannot cope with, that makes me choke and faint? Bad air! Bad air! The approach of some ill-constituted thing; that I have to smell the entrails of some ill-constituted soul!

　　How much one is able to endure: distress, want, bad weather, sickness, toil, solitude. Fundamentally one can cope with everything else, born as one is to a subterranean life of struggle . . .

　　Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollindale. Modern Political Thought: Readings from Machiavelli to Nietzsche, ed. David Wootton （Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996）, 917.

　　Various quoted versions showing different punctuation:

　　Nietzsche's melancholic energy is unmistakable: "At this point I cannot suppress a sigh and a last hope. What is it that I especially find utterly unendurable? That I cannot cope with, that makes me choke and faint? Bad air! Bad air!" （917）

　　"I cannot suppress," Nietzsche says, "a sigh and a last hope" （917）.

　　Nietzsche finds some consolation in the sheer catalog of human suffering: "How much one is able to endure: distress, want, bad weather, sickness, toil, solitude. Fundamentally one can cope with everything else. . ." （917）.

　　"What is it," Nietzsche asks, "that I especially find utterly unendurable?" （917）

　　Nietzsche envisioned the human condition as "a subterranean life of struggle" （917）; his own difficult life bears testimony to this description.