Citations

• "Midway through the journey of my life I woke to find myself in a dark wood."
                    Commedia, Dante Allighieri
• "A screaming comes across the sky."
                    Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
• "The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. They were neither citadels nor churches, but frankly and beautifully office-buildings."
                    Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis
• "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort."
                    The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkein
• "Roubaud came into the room and put the pound loaf, pâté and bottle of white wine on the table."
                    La Bête humaine, Émile Zola
• "All this happened, more or less."
                    Salughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
• "I consider it my good fortune that Fate designated Braunau on the Inn as the place of my birth."
                    Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler
• "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
                    Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
• "On the 24th of February, 1815, the look-out at Notre-Dame de la Garde signalled the three-master, the Pharaon, from Smyrna, Trieste, and Naples."
                    The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas

A Note on terza rima

• A verse form of interlocking three-line stanzas rhyming aba, bcb, cdc, etc. The terza rima form was invented by Dante Alighieri for the Commedia (The Divine Comedy, ca. 1304-1321), using the hendecasyllabic (eleven-syllable) line common to Italian poetry. In De vulgari eloquentia ("On eloquence in the vernacular," 1304-1307), Dante called rhyme concatenatio ("beautiful linkage"), and the triple rhymes beautifully link together the stanzas. Rhyming the first and third lines gives each tercet a sense of temporary closure; rhyming the second line with the first and last lines of the next stanza generates a strong feeling of propulsion. The effect of this chain-rhyme is both open-ended and conclusive, like moving through a series of interpenetrating rooms or going down a set of winding stairs: you are always traveling forward while looking back.

  From A Poet's Glossary by Edward Hirsch, (Harcourt, 2014)