Direct quotation
This is the safest of all methods. If you are going to refer to someone else's work, put the entire exact reference in quotation marks. You must also name the author and say where the quote comes from. This can be done several ways (see Documenting Citation and References for exact methods.) If you are quoting more than one line from a poem or if you are quoting more than five lines of written text, do not put the quotation on the same line as your lead-in sentence and do not use quotation marks. Instead, move to the next line and indent and show the quote as a block of text. When the quote is finished, move to a new line and continue with your paragraph. This shows the quote very clearly and helps to avoid confusion.

An example of a direct quote:
This quote was used in the essay "The Influential Environment":

He came close to losing his hope, and said, "...this land, this river, this jungle the very arch of this blazing sky, appear to me so hopeless and dark, so impenetrable to human thought, so pitiless to human weakness" (93-94).

Note the page numbers put in parenthesis after the quote and that the period doesn't come until AFTER the documented page numbers. The essay's author has named the author and book being quoted previously in the essay, so only the page number is necessary for this quotation.

An example of a block quote (used when your quotation is more than four lines long)
This example shows text talking about a poem, and the poem itself is excerpted as a block quote. Tab your block quote and do not use quotation marks.

The simple joys of existence which are lost in the whirl of our fast lives, self indulgence, and future gazing are pulled sharply into focus in Ed Ochester's poem "The Gift". The voice in the poem belongs to a man lying on a lawn dreaming of things being better ("the Beautiful") while talking of his wife yelling at him for doing just that, and:

    ...the baby was screaming
    because I wouldn't let him eat my cigarettes,
    a tiger cat leaped over the fence,
    smiled at my wife,
    let my baby pull his tail...

    Now God give every man who's hopeless
    a beautiful wife,
    an infant son who sings,
    and the gift of a sweet-faced cat.

The sweetness of the realization that his life really is beautiful in its lawngazing, tiger cat-leaping mundaneness comes through loud and strong to the reader.

Note the "..." which indicate that the verse does not start from the beginning and that there are lines missing after the word "tail." Also note the footnote number at the end of the quote that tells the reader that the documentation information is at the bottom of the page. Did you notice there are no quotation marks? When you block quote, the block itself indicates quotation.