[thehours]

I was hoping for more of the author’s own perspective over those ninety years. Instead, it read more like a stitching project of other people's ideas. In particular the barrage of quote fragments disrupted the flow and made it harder for me to engage with the main point of each section.

[FacelessJim]

It is often the case, that one’s perspective is a personal synthesis of external ideas. The act of quoting great past authors is also a way of recognizing where your influences come from. To describe by association how you think, or aspire to.

These are very difficult topics to properly talk about and correctly express all the nuance in the feeling that you try to convey, and many authors are quoted because they nailed a particular description, evocative of the feeling an author is trying to express and that he feels he can’t do a better job at explaining.

Similarly to how you can narrate a story through a sequence of pictures you can narrate an idea through a sequence of raw concepts, encapsulated in quotes.

[Kye]

It turns out all the aliens in Darmok were very old and that's why they spoke in reference and metaphor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darmok

Meanwhile, I communicate exclusively in Star Trek references.