Epigraphs Quotes

• But I would like to think for a moment about a man who in the morning teaches his students that a false attribution of a Watteau drawing or an inaccurate transcription of a fourteenth-century epigraph is a sin against the spirit and in the afternoon or evening transmits to the agents of Soviet intelligence classified, perhaps vital information given to him in sworn trust by his countrymen and intimate colleagues. What are the sources of such scission? How does the spirit mask itself?

  George Steiner

  Morning, Men, Thinking

  George Steiner (1987). “George Steiner: A Reader”, p.191, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.

  Charles Lamb

  Children, Law, Political

  Essays of Elia "The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple" (1823)

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• Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her; If you can bounce high, bounce for her too, Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you!

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Moving, Gold, Hats

  The Great Gatsby epigraph (1925)

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• Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay To mould me man? Did I solicit thee From darkness to promote me?

  John Milton

  Men, Darkness, Clay

  John Milton (1838). “The Poetical Works of John Milton: With Notes and a Life of the Author”, p.357

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• One of the things I try to do is try to make repetitions, rhymes, and mirrorings across the subject matter of my own books so that the chapter titles and the epigraphs and pictures all kind of form a tapestry. In this book, I retell fifteen of the stories. You have the critical frame, and then you have these rosettes like the motif in a carpet.

  Marina Warner

  Book, Trying, Titles

  Source: therumpus.net

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• He would stab his best friend for the sake of writing an epigraph on his tombstone.

  Oscar Wilde

  Betrayal, Tombstone, Writing

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• It is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is. A book for him or her is not an expression or a series of expressions, but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular sides made of thin sheets of papers which should include a cover, an inside cover, an epigraph in italics, a preface, nine or ten parts with some verses at the beginning, a table of contents, an ex libris with an hourglass and a Latin phrase, a brief list of errata, some blank pages, a colophon and a publication notice: objects that are known to constitute the art of writing.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Art, Latin, Book

  "Evaristo Carriego" by Jorge Luis Borges, (Ch. 3), 1930.

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• Conrad placed on the title page an epigraph taken from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene: "Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please" This also became Conrad's epitaph.

  Joseph Conrad

  Taken, Sleep, Sea

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• But no longer could I aks God what to do, since the answer, I was sure, would not suit me. I could do what suited me know, as long as I could pay for it. 'As long as I could pay for it.' That phrase soon became the tail that wagged my dog. If I had died then, it should have been my epigraph.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Dog, Should Have, Long

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• I'm interested in such things as the difference between how we perceive the world and what the world turns out to be. The difference is between the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves. There is a wonderful Russian saying, which I use as the epigraph of one of my novels, which goes, He lies like an eyewitness. Which is very sly, clever and true.

  Julian Barnes

  Clever, Lying, Differences

  "Conversation: Julian Barnes, Winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize". "Art Beat" with Jeffrey Brown, www.pbs.org. November 8, 2011.

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• From the almost total absence of fossil evidence relative to the origin of the phyla, it follows that any explanation of the mechanism in the creative evolution of the fundamental structural plans is heavily burdened with hypothesis. This should appear as an epigraph to every book on evolution. The lack of direct evidence leads to the formulation of pure conjecture as to the genesis of the phyla; we do not even have a basis to determine the extent to which these opinions are correct.

  Pierre-Paul Grasse

  Book, Creative, Fossils

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