Tag: Epigraph

Connections Making the City Come Alive

I had to admit that I lived for nights like these, moving across the city’s great broken body making connections among its millions of cells. I had a crazy wish or fantasy that some day before I died, if I had all the right neural connections, the city would come all the way alive. Like the Bride of Frankenstein.

Ross Macdonald

Not sure where Macdonald wrote this, but found it as the epigraph from the play, Knuckle, by David Hare.
David Hare Plays 1: Slag; Teeth ‘n’ Smiles; Knuckle; Licking Hitler; Plenty

I Like the Bricks More Than the Building – Nietzsche quote

Error of philosophers: The philosopher believes that the value of his philosophy lies in the whole, in the building. But posterity discovers it in the bricks that he used and which others will often make use of again for better building; in the fact, that is to say, that the building can be destroyed and nevertheless possess value as material.

— Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (1878)

Epigraph found in:
Heidegger in Ruins
Richard Wolin

Some Epigraphs Recently Encountered

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion it has taken place.”
– Often attributed to George Bernhard Shaw. Although its doubtful he ever said it.

If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?
Alan Alda

There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless.
– J.L. Borges, in “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote

A Student’s Guide to Analytical Mechanics
John L. Bohn

This morning I met a woman with a golden nose. She was riding in a Cadillac with a monkey in her arms. Her driver stopped and she asked me, “Are you Fellini?” With this metallic voice she continued, “Why is it that in your movies, there is not even one normal person?”
— Federico Fellini

The Promise
Damon Galgut

Definition of epigraph
1: an engraved inscription
2: a quotation set at the beginning of a literary work or one of its divisions to suggest its theme

“We seek knowledge only because we desire enjoyment, and it is impossible to conceive why a person who has neither desires nor fears would take the trouble to reason.” Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

Epigraph to, Great Books, by David Denby

At the age of forty-eight, writer and film critic David Denby returned to Columbia University and re-enrolled in two core courses in Western civilization to confront the literary and philosophical masterpieces — the “great books” — that are now at the heart of the culture wars. In Great Books, he leads us on a glorious tour, a rediscovery and celebration of such authors as Homer and Boccaccio, Locke and Nietzsche. Conrad and Woolf. The resulting personal odyssey is an engaging blend of self-discovery, cultural commentary, reporting, criticism, and autobiography — an inspiration for anyone in love with the written word.

Amazon

. . . we would assume that what it was we meant would have been listed in some book set down beyond the sky’s far reaches, if at all there was a purpose here. But now I think the purpose lives in us and that we fall into an error if we do not keep our own true notebook of the way we came, how the sleet stung, or how a wandering bird cried at the window. . . – LOREN EISELEY

Epigraph from True Notebooks: A Writer’s Year at Juvenile Hall, Mark Salzman