You know what I’m not a fan of? Books with quotes from other books. Now I’m not talking quotes in the context of discussion or making a point. I’m talking about those pages at the beginning of a book that have a couple of random quotes on them.

Why? Why start off your literary work, which I’m sure you’ve put a lot of effort into, with someone else’s words? Why make the reader try to decipher what these quotes mean, even though you’ve totally taken them out of context? Why force us to spend pages and pages trying to figure out how those quotes connect to the story and why you bothered to put them there in the first place?

I admit, like book dedications, I tend to skip reading the random quotes page. Because really, I just don’t care. But there’s this book I just finished reading that had five of them. Five pages of random quotes, a few at the beginning of each section. And with that much space devoted to them, I figured they must be important.

But they weren’t. At least, not as far as I could tell. What they were, were excerpts from some rather long and confusing books. About thought experiments, which are by their very nature confusing and hard to understand. And I’m given a few sentences and left to fumble along trying to figure out what they mean.

I gave up. I’ve finished the book, and the quotes still don’t make sense, but at least the rest of the book made some sense. I’m just going to assume the author got paid by the page. It makes as much sense as anything else.