  Understanding the ways in which information achieves widespread public
awareness is a research question of significant interest. We consider whether,
and how, the way in which the information is phrased --- the choice of words
and sentence structure --- can affect this process. To this end, we develop an
analysis framework and build a corpus of movie quotes, annotated with
memorability information, in which we are able to control for both the speaker
and the setting of the quotes. We find that there are significant differences
between memorable and non-memorable quotes in several key dimensions, even
after controlling for situational and contextual factors. One is lexical
distinctiveness: in aggregate, memorable quotes use less common word choices,
but at the same time are built upon a scaffolding of common syntactic patterns.
Another is that memorable quotes tend to be more general in ways that make them
easy to apply in new contexts --- that is, more portable. We also show how the
concept of "memorable language" can be extended across domains.

Computation and Language;Social and Information Networks;Physics and Society