Opening Quotes

This is a collection of quotes that authors choose to open their books with, aka epigraphs.

• "... the most elusive island of all, the first person singular." — John McGahern
• "In my books I've imagined people salting the Gulf Stream, damming the glaciers sliding off the Greenland ice cap, pumping ocean water into the dry basins of the Sahara and Asia to create salt seas, pumping melted ice from Antarctica north to provide freshwater, genetically engineering bacteria to sequester more carbon in the roots of trees, raising Florida 30 feet to get it back above water, and (hardest of all) comprehensively changing capitalism." — Kim Stanley Robinson
• "We need to remember that the work of our time is bigger than climate change. We need to be setting our sights higher and deeper. What we're really talking about, if we're honest with ourselves, is transforming everything about the way we live on this planet." — Rebecca Tarbotton
• "I am become death, the shatterer of worlds." — Robert Oppenheimer
• "There is at times a magic in identity of positions; it is one of the things that have suggested to us eternal comradeship. She moved her elbows before saying: 'I have behaved ridiculously.'" — E. M. Forster
• "Believe me, expression is insanity, it arises out of our insanity. It also has to do with turning pages, with hunting from one page to the other, with flight, with complicity in an absurd, gushing effusion, with a vile overflow of verse, with insuring life in a single sentence, and, in turn, with the sentences seeking insurances in life." — Ingeborg Bachmann
• "And they went to the sea in a Sieve." — Edward Lear
• "The first words got polluted Like river water in the morning Flowing with the dirt Of blurbs and the front pages. My only drink is meaning from the deep brain, What the birds and the grass and the stones drink. Let everything flow Up to the four elements, Up to water and earth and fire and air." — Seamus Heaney
• "Soon it seemed to him that the stars had become men, the men stars, the stones beasts, the clouds plants..." — Novalis
• "Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, Nor public men, nor cheering crowds, A lonely impulse of delight Drove to this tumult in the clouds; I balanced all, brought out to mind, The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind In balance with this life, this death." — W. B. Yeats
• "All America liest at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but with us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamt, we live, and what they lived, we dream." — T. K. Whipple
• "That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called "visions", the whole so-called "spirit-world", death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out by life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God." — Rainer Maria Rilke
• "I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself" — Wallace Stevens
• "The dream and the shadow were the best of comrades." — Badibanga
• "And into that gate they shall enter, and in that house they shall dwell, where there shall be on cloud nor sun, no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light, no noise nor silence, but one equal music, no fears nor hopes, but one equal possession, no foes nor friends, but one equal communion and identity, no ends nor beginnings, but one equal eternity." — John Donne
• "It is not down on any map; true places never are." — Herman Melville
• "There must be a kind of painting totally free of the dependence on the figure‒or object‒which, like music, illustrates nothing, tells no story, and launches no myth. Such painting would simply evoke the incommunicable kingdoms of the spirit, where dream becomes thought, where line becomes existence." — Michel Seuphor
• "'...who are you, then?' 'I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.'" — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• "Motto: ... and whatever a man knows, whatever is not mere rumbling and roaring that he has heard, can be said in three words." — Ferdinand Kürnberger
• "Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes. (And he applies his mind to obscure arts.)" — Ovid
• "What Tarquin the Proud said in his garden with the poppy blooms was understood by the son but not by the messenger." — Johann Georg Hamann
• "Keep your mind in hell, and despair not" — Staretz Silouan
• "They come to rest at any kerb: All streets in time are visited." — Philip Larkin
• "I see it now‒this world is swiftly passing." — The Warrior Karna
• "Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing." — Oscar Wilde
• "Human beings do not make history of their own free will. But they make history nevertheless." — Rosa Luxemburg
• "Misanthropy comes of an all too greedy love." — Friedrich Nietzsche
• "It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed." — Vladimir Nabokov
• "You're walking. And you don't always realize it But you're always falling With each step, you fall forward slightly And then catch yourself from falling..." — Laurie Anderson
• "For the activity of the mind is life" — Aristotle
• ""What are days for? Days are where we live. They come, they wake us Time and time over. They are to be happy in: Where can we live but days? Ah, solving that question Brings the priest and the doctor In their long coats Running over the fields."" — Philip Larkin
• "How many of everybody is there going to be?" — Jordan Peele
• "A terrible multitude of duplicates had sprung into being." — Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• "Talking pictures are like lip rouge on the Venus de Milo." — Mary Pickford
• "Light makes photography. Embrace light. Admire it. Love it. But above all, know light. Know it for all you are worth, and you will know the key to photography." — George Eastman
• "Being unable to retrace our steps in Time, we decided to move forward in Space. Shall we never be able to glide back up the stream of Time, and peep into the old home, and gaze on the old faces? Perhaps when the phonograph and the kinesigraph are perfected, and some future worker has solved the problem of colour-photography, our descendants will be able to deceive themselves into something very like it: but it will be but a barren husk, a soulless phantasm and nothing more. "Oh for the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that is still!"" — Wordsworth Donisthorpe
• "God is deaf nowadays" — William Langland
• "The artist appeals to that part of our being... which is a gift and not an acquisition—and, therefore, more permanently enduring." — Joseph Conrad
• "This uprising will bring out the beast in us." — Fela Kuti
• "I was able to expel from my mind all human hope. On every form of joy, in order to strangle it, I pounced stealthily like a wild animal." — Arthur Rimbaud
• "We spend our life trying to bring together in the same instant a ray of sunshine and a free bench." — Samuel Beckett
• "A gold mine is a hole in the ground with a liar standing on top of it." — Mark Twain
• "A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world." — Oscar Wilde
• "An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom." — Charles Baudelaire
• "When the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again." — William Beebe
• "We have maintained a silence closely resembling stupidity." — Junta Tuitiva
• "An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger... Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one's nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes." — James Baldwin
• "Dreams are not so different from deeds as some may think. All the deeds of men are only dreams at first. And in the end, their deeds dissolve into dreams." — Theodor Herzl
• "Ban everything. Purify everything. Moral cleanse everything. Anything that was bad or is bad, destroy it. Especially in the forest, where you live your life as a tree, wielding an axe." — Sigmond C. Monster
• "In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart." — Anne Frank
• "The punishment matches the guilt: to be deprived of all appetite for life, to be brought to the highest degree of weariness of life." — Søren Kierkegaard
• "Only the sun has a right to its spots." — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• "Lawyers, I suppose, were children once." — Charles Lamb
• "Luck: Success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one's own actions." — Dawn O'Porter
• "Aspects are within us and who seems Most kingly is the King." — James Hardy
• "He who truly loves the world shapes himself to please it." — Thomas Mann
• "This reminds me of the ludicrous account he gave Mr. Langton, of the despicable state of a young gentleman of good family. 'sir, when I heard of him last, he was running about town shooting cats.' And then in a sort of kindly reverie, he bethought himself of his own favorite cat, and said, 'But Hodge shan't be shot: no, no, Hodge shall not be shot." — James Boswell
• "Now a boy is of all wild beasts the most difficult to manage. For by how much the more he has the fountain of prudence not fitted up, he becomes crafty and keen, and the most insolent of wild beasts. On this account it is necessary to bind him, as it were, with many chains." — Aristocles Plato
• "Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one." — John Berger
• "If they give you ruled paper, write the other way." — Juan Ramón Jiménez
• "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." — Samuel Johnson
• "You are all a lost generation." — Gertrude Stein

Currently there are 62 epigraphs. The list is ever-growing, so make sure to come back.