Forgive my unsolicited advice. Perhaps you know this already but if you want the blockquote to be unbroken you have to put a > on the blank lines as well.

> This is a paragraph.
>
> And this is another paragraph.

This is a paragraph.

And this is another paragraph.

The markdown parser also treats a hyphen plus space at the start of the line as a bullet. If you want an en dash you use two hyphens. Three gets you an em dash.

--Some famous quotable guy

–Some famous quotable guy

I'm not a robot---

I’m not a robot—