text file changing

[reaper]

sed 's/^"/'\''/' quotes
sed 's/^\./'\'',/' quotes

<?php
$myRandomQuotes=array
(
/*enter array elements like 'adsfasdf','asdfasdfasfd',
);
echo $myRandomQuotes[rand(0,sizeof($myRandomQuotes)-1)];
?>

So I wanted to put in some rotating quotes in this web page, and the quote file I got had a weird format.  Basically any " ' " in the quote file I espcaped with \ ( I left the sed command out for this), and I put the " ' " at the beginning and " ', " at the end with sed.  Out of the thousands of lines only a few didn't work for some reason.  I got the sed commands to work, but I really don't know how it is working, it was pretty much a guess.  How does bash pass parameters to sed when I am adding more single quotes and escaping some, and is bash passing the parameters to sed really the problem when I want to replace say.. the start of a line with the single quote?


edit:
I'm asking is bash passing the parameters to sed the reason I need the extra single quotes, and once in sed , how does it interpret the line.  I guess if someone knows how that's taking place in more detail it would help.

here's how the quotes looked,
'"Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is
 not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist."
 -- Epicurus.
,

sometimes there were words like "won't", and escaping the single quote worked for the php array

[reaper]