Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings describes the Rings of Power, the central plot device of the novel. Many fans, rather than realizing the work was Koontz' own invention, apparently believed it was a real, but rare, volume Koontz later collected the existing verse into an actual book. Dean Koontz's The Book of Counted Sorrows began as a fictional book of poetry from which Koontz would "quote" when no suitable existing option was available Koontz simply wrote all these epigraphs himself.Stephen King's The Dark Half has epigraphs taken from the fictitious novels written by the protagonist.John Green's The Fault in Our Stars has a quotation from a fictitious novel, An Imperial Affliction, which features prominently as a part of the story.Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair has quotations from supposedly future works about the action of the story.This cliché is parodied by Diana Wynne Jones in The Tough Guide To Fantasyland.D'Invilliers is a character in Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby opens with a poem entitled "Then Wear the Gold Hat," purportedly written by Thomas Parke D'Invilliers.
EXCERPTS FROM FAMOUS BOOKS SERIES
For example, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows opens with two: a quotation from Aeschylus's tragedy The Libation Bearers and a quotation from William Penn. Rowling's novels frequently begin with epigraphs relating to the themes explored. An unusual example is The Stand wherein he uses lyrics from certain songs to express the metaphor used in a particular part.Įpigraph and dedication page, The Waste Land Stephen King uses many epigraphs in his writing, usually to mark the beginning of another section in a novel.Thompson's novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." A Samuel Johnson quotation serves as an epigraph in Hunter S.Louis Antoine de Saint-Just's line "Nobody can rule guiltlessly" appears before chapter one in Arthur Koestler's 1941 anti-totalitarian novel Darkness at Noon.The epigraph to Theodore Herzl's Altneuland is "If you will it, it is no dream." which became a slogan of the Zionist movement.As an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway quotes Gertrude Stein, "You are all a lost generation.".Eliot's " The Hollow Men" uses the line "Mistah Kurtz, he dead" from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness as one of its two epigraphs.
The epigraph to Eliot's Gerontion is a quotation from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure.The epigraph to Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov is John 12:24: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.".Doctorow's Ragtime quotes Scott Joplin's instructions to those who play his music, "Do not play this piece fast. Alfred Prufrock" is part of a speech by one of the damned in Dante's Hell. The long quotation from Dante's Inferno that prefaces T.Why, you may take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together – what do you get? The sum of their fears. As the epigraph to The Sum of All Fears, Tom Clancy quotes Winston Churchill in the context of thermonuclear war:.