Trading Quotations

Clive James (1939-2019), "Gianfranco Contini," Cultural Amnesia (2007; rpt. London: Picador, 2012), pp. 133-144 (at 137): Though it can be overdone, there is nothing like a trading of quotations for bringing cultivated people together, or for making you feel uncultivated if you have nothing to trade. Nowadays very few people can quote from the Greek or would think to impress anyone if they could, and even quoting from the Latin — still a universal recognition system in the learned world when I was young — is now discouraged.