Indirect Quotations

Indirect quotes are when you use your own words to rephrase what someone else said. There’s no need for quotation marks in an indirect quote.

Marian said that, “There should be more work tables in this library.”

The word that shows us this quote is being paraphrased. It should read, Marian said that there should be more work tables in this library.

Where did Mark say he was going? He said “he was going to buy bread”.

We can tell by the verbs that this is an indirect quote: the quotation marks can be removed from this sentence.

Andrew said the new restaurant was “good”.

There’s nothing special about a restaurant being good, so there’s probably no need to draw attention to this indirect quote. If Andrew was being facetious or witty (e.g. he said the restaurant was “colonically distressing”), you might use quotation marks to turn this into a direct quote.