While there are thousands of LaTeX commands out there, I use only four with any regularity.

They are:
Italics: \emph{}
Footnotes: \footnote{}
Quotation: \begin{quote} … \end{quote}
Quotation marks: ``…'' (That is, two marks of the thing that's on the same key as the tilde in the upper–left hand corner of the keyboard and two single quotation marks.)

For an example text, try typesetting this from Melville, which I have (inexcusably) contorted in order to demonstrate how these work. Copy and paste these lines into an editor, such as TeXShop on the Mac, and run.

\documentclass{article}

\title{\emph{Moby Dick}, Chapter 49: The Hyena}
\author{Herman Melville}
\date{July 22, 1851}

\begin{document}
\maketitle

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when \emph{a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke}, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. \footnote{However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints.} And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker.
\begin{quote}
That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man
only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke.
\end{quote}
There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy; and with it I now regarded this whole voyage of the Pequod, and the great White Whale its object.

``Queequeg,'' said I, when they had dragged me, the last man, to the deck, and I was still shaking myself in my jacket to fling off the water; ``Queequeg, my fine friend, does this sort of thing often happen?'' Without much emotion, though soaked through just like me, he gave me to understand that such things did often happen.

\end{document}