Graphically alluring

The quotes pulled from the body of a magazine article and printed in bold type are designed to draw the reader in. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don't.

By PETER CARLSON, Washington Post
August 15, 2002

Well, those quotes got your attention, didn't they?

That's what they're supposed to do. They're "pull quotes" from three recent magazines -- Rolling Stone, American Photo and Stuff, respectively -- and they were designed to suck you in. Pull quotes are a tease, a come-on, a little flash of literary leg.

Pull quotes, the little quotes pulled from the body of a magazine article and printed in big, bold type, have two functions: They serve as graphics, providing a visual break in a page of text, and as carnival barkers, luring readers into an article.

It's a humble thing but sometimes it rises to the level of art, becoming a poem, or even a tiny short story, like this little gem from Elle: "Over seven weeks, we were falling in love, leaving bad jobs and marriages, closing deals and having multiple orgasms."

I love a good pull quote. You read a lot of them in my line of work, and over the years I've amassed a collection that I hope will someday serve as the basis for the Norton Anthology of American Pull Quotes.

Some are sexy: "I'm a businesswoman in public and a total slut in the bedroom." (Maxim)

Some are scary: "I was trapped in the air, exposed. He was under me, his huge face in an ugly grin." (Glamour)

Some are surreal: "The crowd broke into a nursery and held baby tortoises hostage on Ecuadoran TV." (GQ)

And some are just plain weird: "Gregory Peck had a nipple erection under his shirt, and in Cinerama that's a nipple erection the size of your fist." (Vanity Fair)

Pull quotes don't always flatter the subject of the stories they tout. Some can be delightfully bitchy, like this one from a New York magazine profile of federal prosecutor Mary Jo White: "Despite her height, she was a fierce member of the women's basketball team as a young prosecutor. 'People checked their knees for teeth marks,' says one lawyer."

Pull quotes are designed to entice, but sometimes they serve readers by scaring them away. I might actually have read James Wolcott's essay on Superman in the March Vanity Fair if I hadn't seen this ludicrous pull quote: "If the death of Superman in 1992 augured early retirement for Bush Sr., his son's presidency seems to have given Superman a new kiss of life."

A pull quote in the recent Harper's reads like something you'd see on a bumper sticker on a Humvee driven by the kind of guy you really don't want in your neighborhood: "Pistols, assault rifles and handheld grenade launchers are the T-shirts of the Twenty-first century."

In a year-old issue of Mother Jones, I found a pull quote that reads like a poem written by a sensitive, alienated teenager, then rejected by his high school literary magazine:

"The future feels so

confined and small, like

a well-trampled empty

lot on the edge of town

with crowds of futurists

hovering around the

perimeter staring at

some miniature animal

yapping madly to get out."

Needless to say, different magazines prefer different styles. Cosmopolitan likes pull quotes that are kinky and neurotic: "Help! My boyfriend is way into bondage." And "I crave sex more than men do. Am I a nympho?" And this classic: "Day one, I was thrown into a dimly lit room with a guy who got off watching me step on crickets."

Rolling Stone loves pull quotes in which rock stars bare their tormented souls: "I take my clothes off a lot in public. It's a combination of self-loathing and lack of shame." And "Lord knows I have no malice in my heart. But I've got tattoos and I still fornicate."

Maxim, a men's magazine that runs Q&A interviews with starlets who are inevitably pictured wearing skimpy bikinis, prints pull quotes that give the impression these starlets are wild and crazy gals -- so wild and crazy they might actually agree to mate with the kind of guys who read Maxim: "At a Thai restaurant in Paris, I got wasted, stood up on a table and sang I Will Survive." And "I don't sleep in anything. I have to be nude, and if I'm not I end up ripping my clothes off in the middle of the night."

Some of the best pull quotes read like the first lines of novels that have yet to be written, novels that come in a variety of genres:

The horror novel: "When I first saw my face, I recoiled and fell to the floor, sobbing. I was an ugly monster." (Marie Claire)

The women's novel: "I slept with my ex-husband only once without protection, and that's when I got pregnant." (Stuff)

The hip, noir crime novel: "Miss Tong lures a man into a disco bathroom stall, where she stabs him to death with her high heel." (Paper)

The epic novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: "A Hungarian Gypsy once read his hands and said, 'You're going to die poor and completely alone.' That prediction gnawed at him over the years." (Vanity Fair)

My favorite comes from Paranoia, a conspiracy theory magazine:

"Icke claims that Queen Elizabeth and the Queen Mum are shape-shifting reptoids intent on the satanic ritualistic eating of babies."

That one's so good I couldn't bear to read the story it advertised. It was bound to be a letdown.

The quotes pulled from the body of a magazine article and printed in bold type are designed to draw the reader in. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don't.

"It's nothing personal, but I just have this urge to French-kiss you."

" 'I weaned Katie,' says Kasmauski, 'and three days later I was in Puerto Rico shooting heroin addicts.' "

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