Epigraph / Literature

Epigraphs in Literature.

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By author

• Isaac Asimov:
  • "The Dead Past": The quote at the beginning of the story comes from a discussion between John W. Campbell and Asimov. This quote inspired the story.
    There's the old saying, "Let the dead past bury its dead." But...how long does a past have to be passed before it's dead?
  • The Foundation Trilogy:
    • When these stories were collected into a Novel format, segments from the Encyclopedia Galactica were included at the start of each chapter to give the setting more depth.
    • "The Traders": The original Astounding Science Fiction publication had only Salvor Hardin's quote. Later republications would cite an Encyclopedia Galactica entry instead, but said entry would also include Hardin's epigram.
• Margaret Atwood is a big fan of epigraphs. The epigraph of The Handmaid's Tale has quotes from Jonathan Swift, the Bible and a proverb. Alias Grace has one or more before each section. Such as this, the epigraph for The Edible Woman:
  "The surface on which you work (preferably marble), the tools, the ingredients and your fingers should be chilled throughout the operation..."
  (Recipe for Puff Pastry in I.S. Rombauer and M.R. Becker, The Joy of Cooking.)
  • Consider this, one of the two epigraphs from Cat's Eye, which makes the way the story is constructed make far more sense:
  "Why do we remember the past, and not the future?" (Stephen Hawking, "A Brief History of Time")
• Both used and parodied in several of Steven Brust's novels, as when each chapter of Teckla is presaged by an excerpt from the protagonist's laundry list.
• Richard Condon's novels, including The Manchurian Candidate and Winter Kills, often have a quote at the beginning from The Keeners' Manual, which doesn't exist.
• Mary Janice Davidson opens every one of her books with three to four epigrahs. Of these, two are serious and the last one is outright silly. (In the Betsy the Vampire Queen books, the last one is usually Betsy herself.
• Gerald Durrell does this at the beginning of every chapter in some of his books.
• T. S. Eliot:
  • The Waste Land has one. Somewhat notable in that it's a poem and that the epigraph is an important clue to what is going on.
  • "The Hollow Men", a shorter poem, not only has an epigraph, but the section in his Selected Poems containing only "The Hollow Men" has one as well. If you look up "The Hollow Men" on the web you'll probably find the two given one after the other; they're both relevant to the poem's meaning.
• All of Jasper Fforde's books (Thursday Next and Nursery Crime series) have an excerpt from a fictional article or book at the start of every chapter.
• In the war novels by Sven Hassel, every chapter begins with a short section of prose, often unrelated to the novel but showing events in the wider war.
• Two of Ken Kesey's novels are prefaced with quotes that each book's title came from.
  • One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest used the children's rhyme "Wire, briar, limber-lock/Three geese in a flock/One flew east, one flew west/One flew over the cuckoo's nest"; it's also used later in one of Bromden's flashbacks. (Some scholars later speculated that the geese are supposed to represent Ratched, McMurphy, and Bromden.)
  • Sometimes a Great Notion quotes the folk song "Goodnight, Irene": "Sometimes I live in the country/Sometimes I live in town/Sometimes I have a great notion/To jump in the river and drown".
• The title and chapter pages of Stephen King's more epic novels quote anything and everything from T. S. Eliot and Thomas Wolfe to Blue Öyster Cult and King's own fictional characters.
• Rudyard Kipling frequently supplemented an epigraph to both poetry and prose, up to a short poem before a novel. Some of these either add a twist or are plainly ironic when compared to the text.
• Ursula K. Le Guin is fond of this trope. Quite a few of her books have epigraphs:
  • The Earthsea books A Wizard of Earthsea and The Other Wind both begin with in-universe epigraphs, "The Creation of Ea" and "The Song of the Woman of Kemay" respectively.
  • The Hainish book The Telling begins with a line from The Mahabharata.
  • The Lathe of Heaven uses epigraphs, many from Taoist thinkers, at the beginning of each chapter.
• Christopher Moore:
  • Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff begins each segment with a related quote about God or Jesus.
  • As do the sections/parts of Practical Demonkeeping, The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove and A Dirty Job.
  • Fool, which is a retelling of King Lear, has quotes from the play at the beginning for each chapter.
• Tim Powers almost always quotes a bunch of British poems at the beginning of his books and of the chapters. Often a book will begin with two quotes, one real and one from "William Ashbless", a fictitious poet and shared Author Avatar-proxy of Tim Powers and James P. Blaylock; Ashbless appears in Powers' The Anubis Gates.
• J. K. Rowling:
  • Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows quotes from Aeschylus's The Libation Bearers and Penn's Fruits of Solitude. The theme of both quotes, of course, is death and its aftermath.
  • The Casual Vacancy opens each section with a relevant quote from Local Council Administration by Charles Arnold-Baker, as befitting a story revolving around a small-town government; the first epigram conveniently defines what a casual vacancy is.
  • Cormoran Strike Novels:
    • The Cuckoo's Calling opens each section with a quotation from various Roman satirists (in the original Latin).
    • Each chapter of The Silkworm is headed with a quote from classic English playwrights.
    • Each chapter of Lethal White is headed with a quote from the Henrik Ibsen play.
• Brandon Sanderson:
  • Sanderson likes doing this with his fantasy works - at the beginning of each chapter is a quotation form an in-universe source. In The Final Empire, the epigraphs are from the diary of Alendi, the supposed Hero of Ages, whose packman Rashek killed him and became the Lord Ruler. In The Well of Ascension, the epigraphs were written by Kwaan, the man who first announced Alendi as the Hero of Ages, and gives some hints into the prophecies behind the Hero of Ages. In the third and final book, the epigraphs are written by the Hero of Ages, Sazed, after he takes in both Ruin and Preservation and fixes the world, detailing what he did and how he did it as Harmony.
  • It gets even more complicated in The Way of Kings (2010), the first book of The Stormlight Archive, because the epigraphs are from different sources. In Part 1, the epigraphs are cryptic quotes from people just before their death, which are being collected by Taravangian. They are supposedly the first glimpses of the world beyond, having started seven years before the story starts, roughly when Gavilar first investigated the Shattered Plains, and at least one is a quote from the Lost Herald. In Part 2, the epigraphs are from a letter, probably (but not certainly) written by Hoid and addressed to an unknown person, in which the writer begs whoever the recipient is to end his neutrality and help him in the coming war against Odium. This letter gives hints as to the workings of the Cosmere at large, talking about the Shards on Sel (and how Odium killed them) as well as talking of Odium's ally Bavadin and a mysterious group called 'The Seventeenth Shard. The epigraphs in Part 3 are notes from Jasnah's research on the Voidbringers. Part 4 returns to the quotes from the dying, and Part 5 doesn't have any epigraphs, but considering the massive amount of reveals in those chapters, it doesn't need any.
• Most Dorothy L. Sayers novels begin each chapter with a quotation, often from poetry.
• Tan Twan Eng:
  • The Gift of Rain starts with a quotation from Jean-Dominique Bauby's The Diving Bell & the Butterfly: "I am fading away. Slowly but surely. Like the sailor who watches his home shore gradually disappear, I watch my past recede. My old life still burns within me, but more and more of it is reduced to the ashes of memory."
  • The Garden of Evening Mists starts with a quotation from Richard Holmes' A Meander Through Memory and Forgetting: "There is a goddess of Memory, Mnemosyne; but none of Forgetting. Yet there should be, as they are twin sisters, twin powers, and walk on either side of us, disputing for sovereignty over us and who we are, all the way until death."

A-E

• Each of the parts in Accelerando opens with a different quote:
  • Part 1, "Slow Takeoff":
    The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim. — Edsger W. Dijkstra
  • Part 2, "Point of Inflection":
    Life is a process which may be abstracted from other media. — John Von Neumann
  • Part 3, "Singularity":
    There's a sucker born every minute. — P. T. Barnum
• Several of Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole books begin with an epigraph taken from D.H Lawrence (The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4), Bertrand Russell (The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole), The Winter's Tale (The Wilderness Years) and Mikhail Lermontov and Hamlet (The Cappuccino Years).
• Most chapters of American Gods start with one, often foreshadowing later events in the chapters. They range from Robert Frost to E. E. Cummings, and from Stephen Sondheim to Tom Waits.
• The novelisation of the decidedly camp and blockbuster The Avengers film begins each chapter with a more-or-less 'relevant' quote from The Tempest. That particular play might have been chosen because the villain of The Avengers is a man who can control the weather.
• Barefoot Boy with Cheek by Max Shulman begins each chapter with a phrase that might be taught in a "Beginning French" course attributed to a famous French author.
• Black Horizon took its title from the epigraph, an anonymous eighteenth-century poem. In the author's book on how to write, he admitted he thought of the title first, then made up the poem.
• Barbara Hambly's Bride of the Rat God quotes the I Ching.
• Perhaps in deference to the opening quote, Junot Diaz's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao takes its epigraph from Fantastic Four #49, penned by Stan Lee.
• The novel version of Bright Lights, Big City quotes from The Sun Also Rises at the beginning.
• Brown Girl in the Ring: From the prologue:
  Give the Devil a child for dinner,
  One, two, three little children!
  -Derek Walcott, Ti-Jean and His Brothers
• But What If We're Wrong?, a book speculating about how widely accepted views might change in the future, begins with this quote:
  If what I say now seems to you to be very reasonable, then I’ll have failed completely. — Arthur C. Clarke, speaking in the year 1964, attempting to explain what the world might be like in the year 2000
• Call It Sleep, by Henry Roth, begins with a made-up, unattributed quotation: "I pray thee ask no questions / this is that golden land"
• The Honor Harrington book Cauldron of Ghosts uses epigraphs before certain chapters. Unusually, these are actually quotes from later in the book, sans context.
• Ciaphas Cain ^note HERO OF THE... oh, what's the point? chapters have fictional epigraphs that are written in-universe by the author.
  • The Horus Heresy novels also make extensive use of them, using either quotes from previous 40k books or real world sources. What's interesting about the real quotes is that they're all a major case of Future Imperfect, mangling either the quote, the source's name and/or background information (getting Laozi confused with Chairman Mao; describing real life military leaders in terms of the Imperium's odd sci-fi Romanesque ranking structure; badly translated quote from The Bible described as fragments of the holy book of some long-extinct cult, etc.). This despite the fact that The Emperor (and a few other characters) has been around since the 8th century BC or longer and presumably could have corrected them if he felt like it.
• City of Bones begins with quotes from Julius Caesar and Paradise Lost.
• Each chapter of The Club Dumas begins with a different quote, several of which come from Alexandre Dumas's works. Interestingly, the well-read will see chapter five's quote and will logically come to an early conclusion about who is the Big Bad. This is a Red Herring that the supposed Big Bad will later call the reader out on.
• Carl Sagan's novel Contact has so many quotes at the beginning of the parts and chapters that it looks like an anthology of quotations.
• Coraline begins with a paraphrase of a quote from G. K. Chesterton, "Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten."
• The eighth Alex Rider book, Crocodile Tears, uses a definition of the phrase the book is titled for as its epigraph. This was included because Anthony Horowitz's publishers believed the phrase was not widely known and most readers would not understand what the title meant, and they initially wanted him to change the title completely. Horowitz resisted, and his publishers eventually relented on condition the epigraph was included.
• A Darkling Plain, the last book in the Mortal Engines quartet, has the last stanza of Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach as its epigraph.
• The Death of the Vazir Mukhtar, being a historical novel about a famous Russian poet and polyglot, has short relevant lines from poems or songs in different languages at the beginning of every chapter but the last (by which point he dies).
• Katherine Kurtz's Deryni series has quotes from The Bible, the Apocrypha, and other early Christian and Jewish writings appear at above the start of most chapters.
  • Other real-world sources (such as the Roman playwright Terence) get quoted this way as well. The chapter in which Jehana is introduced in Deryni Rising has an epigraph adapted from William Congreve's The Mourning Bride (1697): "Heaven has no rage, like love to hatred turned,/ .....Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorned." The idea is far older (not to say proverbial), as seen in Euripides' play Medea (263): "In all other things a woman is full of fear, incapable of looking on battle or cold steel; but when she is injured in love, no mind is more murderous than hers."
  • A few sources are from within the Deryni universe. The first chapter of Deryni Checkmate has an epigraph from a "St. Veneric" which mentions the fickleness of Gwynedd's weather in March, and chapter fifteen of the same book has this from an unknown Deryni monk: "The humans kill what they do not understand."
• The Diamond Age starts with a short excerpt from a non-fiction book about sociological change.
• In The Disaster Artist, the two narrative threads are framed by Epigraphs from two different sources: the segments relating the history of Greg Sestero's friendship with Tommy Wiseau uses quotes from The Talented Mr. Ripley and the segments relating the events during the production of The Room (2003) uses quotes from Sunset Boulevard. The final chapter, which describes the theatrical debut of The Room, uses both.
• Don Quixote begins with a note from the author, explaining that he despaired of finding a suitable epigraph for the book, until his friend suggested making shit up.
• The early Dragonriders of Pern books by Anne McCaffrey have snippets of Harper songs at the start of each chapter.
• The Dragon Waiting by John M. Ford, which concerns the English monarchial succession of the 15th century, has an epigraph quoting from the play Perkin Warbeck, which concerns the English monarchial succession of the 15th century and is by the 17th-century playwright John Ford (no relation).
• Frank Herbert's Dune books begin every single chapter with an epigraph, always from an in-universe source, and often pertaining to the chapter's subject matter. For example, in the first book, the chapter where Leto dies is prefaced as follows:
  "There is a legend that the instant the Duke Leto Atreides died a meteor streaked across the skies above his ancestral palace on Caladan."
• The Empirium Trilogy: Every chapter starts off with a quote à la Dune, which usually ties into the content of the chapter in some way, though some connections are more obvious than others. For example, the chapter that details Rielle's water trial starts off with the Water Rite.

F-O

• Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas opens with the following quote from Samuel Johnson: "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."
• Joe Abercrombie quotes the line from which the title of each of his books is taken, in his The First Law series.
• For Whom the Bell Tolls has a quote from the poet John Donne, which also provides the title:
  No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
• Foucault's Pendulum features plenty of somewhat obscure and bizarre epigraphs, some of them in other languages. All or most of them still manage to be relevant, though. The majority is taken from a wide variety of occult literature, but there are also things like a musing on the physics of a hanged man.
• The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles has not just an epigraph for the novel as a whole, but two epigraphs per chapter.
• Each book in the Gemma Doyle trilogy begins with excerpts from poems, namely "The Lady of Shalott" in the first book, Paradise Lost and "A Dream Within a Dream" in the second and "The Rose of Battle" in the third.
• Mario Puzo's novel The Godfather opens with a (paraphrased) quote from Honoré de Balzac's 1835 novel Le Père Goriot: "Behind every great fortune there is a crime."^note The actual quote is better translated as "The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, for it was properly done." As quoted by Puzo, it is closer to a paraphrase by Richard O'Connor in his book The Oil Barons: Men of Greed and Grandeur.
• La Grande Encyclopédie des lutins, by Pierre Dubois, is a catalogue of various fairies and fey creatures. Each entry is preceded by a quote from a book, which either refers directly to the given type of fairy, or at least vaguely fits its theme. However, some of the quotes are apparently made up.
• Gravity's Rainbow, which is divided into four parts, has one epigraph for each. Specially clever is the one for the last chapter:
  "What?"
  — Richard Nixon
• F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby opens with a wonderful epigraph (which almost provided the title), by "Thomas Parke D'Invilliers" - actually a fictional character in Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise.
• Grendel opens with a selection of "The Mental Traveller" by William Blake.
• Half of a Yellow Sun not only has an epigraph from Chinua Achebe at the beginning of the book, but has all the chapters narrated by one of its Switching P.O.V. protagonists start with an epigraph from the fictional book he is writing. In the end, he scraps the book he wanted to write and a mother character turns out to have written the epigraphs instead.
• His Dark Materials makes use of this trope in two of its installments: The Golden Compass/Northern Lights begins with a quote from Paradise Lost, (including the lines which gave the series its name) and The Amber Spyglass, along with giving almost every chapter a short quote, uses Walt Whitman's America, a Prophecy and two other poems to set a very poignant mood.
• Hothouse: The story begins by quoting two lines from Andrew Marvell, a 17th century poet.
  My vegetable love should grow
  Vaster than empires and more slow — "To His Coy Mistress"
• InCryptid: Every chapter and prologue, as well as some of the short stories (not the prequel ones) has an epigraph by a member of the Price-Healy family (or the Baker family, who married in). The Istas and Ryan shorts, as well as "The Holy and Harrowing Pilgrimage of Mindy and Also Mork", cite cultural proverbs for the epigraphs. A list can be found here.
• Cornelia Funke begins each chapter of all three of her Inkheart novels with quotes from numerous other works of literature that hint at or relate to the plot of the chapter, including everything from The Princess Bride to Salman Rushdie.

• The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, about the history of information theory and communication, starts with two epigraphs relating to the theme (the first one comes from Zadie Smith's White Teeth). (The book also includes relevant quotes at the start of every chapter.)
  Anyway, those tickets, the old ones, they didn’t tell you where you were going, much less where you came from. He couldn’t remember seeing any dates on them, either, and there was certainly no mention of time. It was all different now, of course. All this information. Archie wondered why that was. — Zadie Smith
  What we call the past is built on bits. — John Archibald Wheeler
• All but the first two Inspector Morse novels by Colin Dexter use epigraphs at the top of every chapter. As Dexter's chapters tend to be fairly short, that's a LOT of epigraphs. Not that the research fazed Dexter one bit - if he couldn't find a suitable quote, he simply made one up and credited a non-existent source. This happened a lot.
• Ann Radcliffe's novel The Italian quotes several works of William Shakespeare, lines from Milton's Paradise Lost and other writing from before her time.
• Jake and the Dynamo, a Magical Girl novel, opens with this fitting quote:
  It is rare that one can see in a little boy the promise of a man, but one can almost always see in a little girl the threat of a woman. — Alexandre Dumas

• Lord of Light is set on a planet where Hindu Mythology has been made real while the protagonist plays the role of Buddha, and accordingly it features quotes from Buddhist and Hindu literature, such as the Upanishads.
• The Master and Margarita begins with a highly appropriate quote from Goethe's Faust:
  "I am part of that force which wills forever evil and works forever good."
• In testament to the author's nerdiness, the Mediochre Q Seth Series uses the Oxford English Dictionary for its epigraphs.
• Middlemarch by George Eliot has an unusual variation. Most chapters have epigraphs (from writers like Shakespeare and such) but where it seems she couldn't find a suitable quote, she makes one herself. You can tell which because they're unattributed and are generally dialogues between 1st Gent and 2nd Gent.
• Herman Melville's Moby-Dick opens with four pages of quotes about whales (starting with "And God created great whales," from The Bible).
• Parodied in Robert Asprin's Myth Adventures series, which includes gag quotes attributed to famous real or fictional characters. Most are invented ("In times of crisis, it is of utmost importance not to lose one's head. — M. Antoinette), but occasionally a legitimate quote is used to preface a chapter whose contents make it funny in context.
  • Russian Alternate History novel writer Vladimir Sverzhin does exactly the same thing (such as musings on running being good for your health attributed to the original Marathon Runner).
• Nobody by Jennifer Lynn Barnes begins with an Emily Dickinson quote: "Hello, I'm nobody, who are you? Are you nobody too?" Given the plot of the book (two supernatural beings called "Nobodies" meet and fall in love), it's an appropriate choice.
• In The Oath, Frank Peretti occasionally opens chapters with quotes from letters, diaries, news reports, and interviews to set the atmosphere for Hyde River.

P-W

• Charles Babbage's autobiography, Passages From the Life of a Philosopher, begins with a quote from Don Juan: "I'm a philosopher. Confound them all — birds, beasts and men; but no, not womankind," despite the fact that it has nothing to do with the book.
• Phantastes: From the first chapter:
  “A spirit . . .
  . . . . . .
  The undulating and silent well,
  And rippling rivulet, and evening gloom,
  Now deepening the dark shades, for speech assuming,
  Held commune with him; as if he and it
  Were all that was.”
  SHELLEY’S Alastor.
• A Practical Guide to Evil does one from an in-universe source at the beginning of every chapter, helping frame the chapters while acting as a source of worldbuilding and/or foreshadowing of in-world events or plot elements—or, on occasion, excuses to read the comedically evil exploits of the various Dread Emperors and Empresses of Praes. Interestingly, some are memoirs or religious documents written after the events of the story, which are referenced as being written during the story later on.
• Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson begins every chapter with two quotes from "The Calendar of Pudd'nhead Wilson."
• Frank Zappa's autobiography The Real Frank Zappa Book points out that "[t]he epigraphs at the heads of chapters (publishers love those little things) were researched and inserted by Peter (Occhiogrosso, the co-author) — I mention this because I wouldn't want anybody to think I sat around reading Flaubert, Twitchell and Shakespeare all day." Zappa's reaction to an epigraph quoting Flaubert is "How 'bout that epigraph, huh? Peter, you're cracking me up already."
• The first and last books of the Rihannsu series each use a verse from Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay's Epic Poem Horatius, followed by a quotation from a Romulan-written Fictional Document.
• The Robotech novelizations have each chapter lead by an in-universe quote, usually from various historical works that cover the Robotech Wars retrospectively, but also including more informal sources ranging from main characters' memoirs to relevant quips made by anonymous Spear Carrier types. The author(s) stated they were directly inspired by Dune.
• Geoffrey Household's 1939 novel Rogue Male contains an epigraph describing the behaviour of the rogue males of the animal kingdom which also hints at the themes of the book.
• Adam Mickiewicz's poem "Romantycznosc" (Romanticity) begins with a quote from Hamlet: "Methinks, I see... where? – In my mind's eyes." It is quoted from the part where Hamlet says he sees his dead father in his "mind's eye". Mickiewicz's poem itself is about a hallucinating girl who claims to see her dead lover.
• The Second Apocalypse series has a twofer: Each chapter begins with a quote from a fictional In-Universe source, as an Encyclopedia Exposita, and each book begins with a quote from a Real Life source, usually a philosopher, including Nietzsche, Kant, and Hegel, as well as the Bible.
• The Secret Life of Bees begins each chapter with some small, pithy note on bees and their life.
• All four books of Tad Williams' Shadowmarch series have their chapters begin with excerpts from different in-universe texts.
  • Shadowmarch begins each chapter with a quotation from the Bonefall Oracles, which make up part of the Qar's semi-holy text, the Book of Regret.
  • Shadowplay begins each chapter with a section of the tale of the Theomachy, or Godswar, as interpreted by the three major factions of the series (the Trigonate believers of the northern continent, the Xandians of the southern continent, and the Qar).
  • Shadowrise begins each chapter with a quotation from an essay on the Qar peoples revealed in the last entry to have been written by the playwright and spy Finn Teodoros for Lord Avin Brone, lord constable of Southmarch Castle.
  • Shadowheart begins each chapter with a section of the child's fable of the Orphan which is revealed in the last entry to have been written for the young prince Olin Alessandros Eddon by the poet Matthias Tinwright, after the events of the series.
• The chapters in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants begin with epigraphs.
• Robert B. Parker's Spenser novels with Literary Allusion Titles often began with an epigraph containing the relevant portion of the poem invoked by the title.
• Philip Pullman's Spring-Heeled Jack starts off every chapter with quotes, including chestnuts such as "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night" and "Meanwhile, back at the ranch...."
• Star Wars Legends:
  • Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor starts off with a Luke quote which actually turns out to be from that very book. (It got quite meta at the end.)
  • Death in the Slave Pits of Lorrd, or How I Spent My Inter-Term Break", an essay by Tash Arranda of Galaxy of Fear'', has several of its sections headed by quotes from Fictional Documents. They're cited at the bottom.
• Both books of The Sundering open with a quote from Paradise Lost.
• Sundiver, a science fiction novel about an expedition to the Sun, starts with the quote by the astronomer Arthur Eddington:
  ...it is reasonable to hope that in the not too distant future we shall be competent to understand so simple a thing as a star. — A. S. Eddington, 1926
• Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint has one, along with most of her other novels.
• Jean Johnson's Theirs Not to Reason Why series has each chapter begin with a quote from the interview of the main character. It introduces some aspect of the subject of that chapter. It seems an odd construct, until you come to the section of the last book where she actually grants the reporter that interview, and then it all makes sense.
• Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart famously takes its title from William Butler Yeats' The Second Coming; the stanza containing the "things fall apart" line is quoted as the epigraph.
• Three Christs of Ypsilanti, a nonfiction book about three mental patients, each claiming to be Jesus Christ, opens with the quote by the philosopher Bertrand Russell:
  “Every man would like to be God, if it were possible; some few find it difficult to admit the impossibility.” — Bertrand Russell, Power
• Tortall Universe: In Trickster's Choice, chapters are prefaced with either excerpts of a letter or lecture, or with in-universe epigraphs from books on spying or gods or suchlike, depending on what's relevant to the upcoming events.
• Ryan Holiday's Trust Me, I'm Lying, about fake news and inaccuracy in online journalism, starts with the following quote by writer James Agee. Every one of its chapters also starts with a quote, mostly damning towards journalism.
  The very blood and semen of journalism, on the contrary, is a broad and successful form of lying. Remove that form of lying and you no longer have journalism. — James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
• Each book of The Twilight Saga begins with a different quote:
  • Twilight has The Bible.
  • New Moon has Romeo and Juliet.
  • Eclipse has the Robert Frost poem "Fire and Ice."
  • Breaking Dawn has three: "Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies" by Edna St. Vincent Millay, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Orson Scott Card's Empire.
• Fictional examples are used in The War Against the Chtorr, ranging from newspaper articles and quotes by Solomon Short (a newspaper columnist) in the first two books, limericks in the third book, and quotes from The Red Book in the fourth.
• Watership Down has one for each chapter. An interesting example in that it sometimes cites non-fiction, notably, The Private Life of the Rabbit, by Ronald Lockley.
• Weaveworld (by Clive Barker) has every chapter begin with a quote.
• Whateley Universe: On some of the stories, like The Evil That Men Do:
  • Part 1:
    They say, when you gain a lover
    You begin to lose a friend;
    That the end of the beginning's
    The beginning of the end.
    They say the moment that you're born
    Is when you start to die...
    Roger Whittaker, The First Hello, The Last Goodbye
  • Part 2:
    I wouldn't if I were you
    I know what she can do
    She's deadly man, she could really rip your world apart
    Mind over matter
    Ooh, the beauty is there but a beast is in the heart
    Hall & Oates, Maneater
• The Wind Knows My Name begins with a quote from The Little Prince
  "Here is my secret. It is very simple. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
• Studs Terkel's collection of interviews, Working, begins with four quotations on the subject of working, from The Bible to a Nixon speech and an advertisement.
• The chapters in Annie Dillard's The Writing Life each begin with an epigraph.
• Writing on the Wall, about the history of social media since ancient time through successive eras of human history, includes a relevant quote from the given era at the start of every chapter. For example, the chapter on the ancient Roman equivalent of social media starts with a quote from Cicero:
  You say my letter has been widely published: well, I don’t care. Indeed, I myself allowed several people to take a copy of it. —- Marcus Tullius Cicero, Ad. Att. 8.9

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