How to Reply Quoting Only Highlighted Text in Gmail

The pontiff looked like a man who pointed his index finger at faces in his mind, counting. Now he was clearly looking at rows and columns, adding up the numbers.
"How many people work in the Vatican?" had been the journalist's question. John XXIII was ready to deliver his answer: "About half."
If you want to quote about half the original message instead of everything, here's how to put Gmail to work:
›› Instead of trying to clean your replies after the fact in Gmail, highlight what you want to include from the original message and have only that quoted.