The last misquotation type in the "more fluent" category is the most blatant. It actually reworks to a great extent the original line, usually by shortening or simplifying it—and while the result is doubtless superior from a purely oratorical perspective (as in, it sounds more dramatic and is more likely to lodge itself in your mind), it also departs to an alarming extent from the original. Take the oft-quoted Thomas Carlyle gem, from his life of Frederick the Great: "Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains." Isn't that nice? A simple, strong definition. Except, Carlyle wrote, "The good plan itself, this comes not of its own accord; it is the fruit of genius (which means transcendent capacity of taking trouble, first of all)." Not quite the same thing, is it? (But just try to bring the real monster of a phrase to mind when you need a good quote to drive a point home.)

It's not too far from that elaborate paraphrasing to, more literally, putting words into the mouths of unsuspecting quote victims. Marie Antoinette's "let them eat cake" would be one of the most famous lines in history were it not for the fact that she never actually said it. The line comes instead from Book 6 of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, written several years before Marie Antoinette ever came to Versailles—and its speaker is never actually named but rather referred to as a "great princess." (Oh, and it's not cake; it's brioche.)

And poor Mark Twain. He seems to have said everything there is to say in the world. Several of my favorite lines turn out to be purely apocryphal, like "I would rather go to bed with Lillian Russell stark naked than with Ulysses S. Grant in full military regalia" and "Giving up smoking is easy. I've done it hundreds of times." Several other bon mots are actually not original to Twain, but rather quoted by him (Twain, to his credit, always gave the source; his listeners and readers paid less careful attention.) "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics," for instance, was, according to Twain, an invention of Benjamin Disraeli's, and "Wagner's music is better than it sounds" originated with Edgar Wilson Nye. Twain was a witty man, but, alas, he didn't say it all. (But the quotes, like Lincoln's, stick because they make sense; the greater the cognitive ease, the more superficial and less suspicious the thinking. Why question if we have no reason to think anything is wrong?)

Then, there are those quotes that aren't technically wrong—except they become attributed to a literary character when they were really said by his film counterpart. These, too, aren't malicious; in many cases, our minds simply misremember. Especially if a film's line has that fluency that our memories so love, we might forget entirely that the source was the movie and not the book. Into that bucket falls Sherlock Holmes's most memorable line, "Elementary, my dear Watson," which was never written by Arthur Conan Doyle but came instead from the 1929 film. (Though it's the first Holmes line that likely comes to mind for most fans.) There, too, we put Dracula's famed, "I want to suck your blood"—not words ever penned by Bram Stoker.