Using quotes as a touchstone/epigraph

[Velka]

I'm interested if anyone else uses quotes as a touchstone for chapters (or a work as a whole). I find it is a useful tool to keep me focused on the idea, feeling, or flavour I want it to convey.

Right now they just live in the notes section of my Scrivener files, but I am humouring the idea of using them as an epigraph for each chapter of my WIP. The literary geek in me loves those things, but I know they can come across as cliche.

Thoughts?

 

[Guy]

I use them for the same reason, though I make sure not to use quotes that are already used too much.

 

[Penpilot]

I used them once for a novel. I did a mixture of real and made up quotes that captured a fundamental theme of the chapter. It was also a way for me to slip in a few bits of world building.

 

[spectre]

not everyone is into philosophy it's sort of something that grows on someone and etiquette is sometimes engulfed by the idea that being so open about one's self is fallable. I think people might read them, but I've heard it said at least once I think that a person who did not enjoy fantasy complained the attempt to create scholars work from something that was a fairy tale was another turn off for them to the material.

I myself like them, the entire idea of fantasy is to enravel yourself in a culture that is boundary free but it's good I think to make some kind of chronicling to the story. you could read Freud's literature on fairy tales in human beings if you wanted to get a real psychological perspective on fantasy in a realistic sense, I haven't read it but I could guess it's contents just like Civilization and It's Discontents.

I don't mean to be condescending, but here Psychoanalysis and Fairy-Tales