[Tex/LaTex] How to reduce the space between paragraphs and block quotes

quotingspacing

I'm using the mla package from the texlive-humanities ubuntu package to format an MLA-style paper. Unfortunately, something is a little off, and there's a little extra space between paragraphs and the beginning and end of a block quote. Am I writing this incorrectly, or is there a command to close the space? 

\documentclass[11pt,letterpaper]{article}
\usepackage{ifpdf}
\usepackage{mla}

%Xelatex Stuff
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{xunicode}
\usepackage{xltxtra} 
\usepackage{ellipsis}  

\setmainfont[Mapping=tex-text]{Linux Libertine O}

\begin{document}
\begin{mla}{John}{Reeve}{Professor So-and-So}{Nietzsche's Impact on 20th Century Thought}{\today}{Nietzsche as Anthropologist of Religion: Theogony, Purity, Anthropomorphism}
    Of course, Nietzsche does not predicate his theories on cultural difference to the extent that ethnographers do. One could also argue that his differences are not as dramatic as theirs, and would hardly count as difference. After all, the culture of the ancient Greeks, the culture Nietzsche dicusses the most after that of Germany, forms such a central part of western culture that it would seem \emph{prima facie} to provide less of a delta-value than would, say, a comparison with Bantu culture. Yet his analysis of Greek religion is more in-depth, perhaps, than that of the likes of James Frazer, whose “butterfly-collecting” anthropology has been criticized as decontextualizing the cultures he proports to discuss. 

In an early (1908) lecture in anthropology, J.L. Myres declares that there are
\begin{quote}
two kinds of anthropologists. \ldots\  There is an anthropologist to whom we go for our facts: the painful accurate observer of data, the storehouse of infinite detail. \ldots\ To him we go for our facts. \ldots\ His views may matter little. \ldots\ And there is an anthropologist to whom we look for our light. His learning may be fragmentary, \ldots\ but with shattered and ricketty instruments he attains results; heedless of epicycles, disrespectuful to the equator, he bequeaths his paradoxes to be demonstrated by another generation of men. [H]e has learnt to see; and what he sees he says (Haddon 100-1). 
\end{quote}

Best Answer

The mla package defines its own blockquote environments blocks (for single paragraphs) and blockm (for multiple paragraphs) which don't have the extra vertical space. They also single-space their contents, which is probably something your professor wants.

The regular LaTeX quote environment has extra vertical space because it's treated like a list. Add this to your preamble to kill the regular list vertical spacing just within quote:

\usepackage{etoolbox}
\makeatletter
\AtBeginEnvironment{quote}{\appto\@listi{\parsep\z@ \topsep\z@ \itemsep\z@}}
\makeatother
Related Question