Clever lines routinely travel from obscure mouths to prominent ones.

Keyes is pointing to a common pattern in the life of quotations: memorable phrasing often gets detached from its original speaker and reattached to someone more famous. The “travel” from “obscure mouths” to “prominent ones” suggests a kind of social gravity in attribution—audiences, editors, and later repeaters tend to prefer a prestigious name that feels plausible or marketable. The line also implies that misattribution is not an occasional accident but a routine mechanism by which sayings circulate, gain authority, and become culturally durable, even as the true origin is erased.