Busy week means that this will be a brief post.  So I thought I might at least make it entertaining.  Several members of the Cornell Department of Computer Science [http://www.cs.cornell.edu/]  have published a paper in the Proceedings of the 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics titled You Had Me at Hello: How Phrasing Affects Memorability, which analyzes memorable movie quotes to see what makes them stick.  

The money quote:

In fact, comments provided by the human sub- jects as part of the task suggested two basic forms that such textual signals could take: subjects felt that (i) memorable quotes often involve a distinctive turn of phrase; and (ii) memorable quotes tend to invoke general themes that aren’t tied to the specific setting they came from, and hence can be more easily in- voked for future (out of context) uses.

It’s well worth a read.