The article considers American poet Louis Zukofsky’s work in roughly chronological order so as to trace the development of his faith in the memory of words, in the ability of quoted words to remember their origin, to drag their contexts along, to stand for a longer development, and more generally to accumulate information. I isolate and explore three major phenomena that enable the coming into being of the one-word quote, namely Zukofsky’s practice of quotation, his conception of the word, and his practice of self-quotation This fetishistic practice stands in unresolved contradiction with Zukofsky’s materialistic stance.