How to Use epigraph in a Sentence

epigraph

noun

• That Blake couplet in the epigraph above runs through my head.
  — B. R. Cohen, Longreads, 13 Jan. 2026
• Come for the Sylvia Plath epigraph, stay for, well, the whole thing.
  — Leor Galil, Chicago Reader, 13 Feb. 2018
• This declaration might be read as an epigraph for all three books.
  — David L. Ulin, Harper's Magazine, 24 Nov. 2020
• In my book, the word han never appears except in the title and the epigraph.
  — Literary Hub, 3 Apr. 2026
• These are signalled by the novel’s epigraph, which comes from the Book of Job.
  — Giles Harvey, The New Yorker, 20 Mar. 2023
• That includes Oliver, whose words here could serve as an epigraph for this marvelous play.
  — Mike Fischer, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 19 June 2018
• Each of the book’s 52 chapters bears an epigraph taken from the Bible.
  — Barton Swaim, WSJ, 14 Nov. 2022
• Two of the novel’s epigraphs might illustrate what fiction can accomplish.
  — Sam Needleman, The New York Review of Books, 2 Sep. 2023
• That could be the epigraph for your new book, Tom Scheerer Decorates.
  — Douglas Brenner, House Beautiful, 4 Aug. 2013
• Farmers had wrenched the metal from monuments to make tools and used broken statues and epigraphs to build walls to protect their flocks and crops.
  — Rachel Howard, Travel + Leisure, 26 Apr. 2024
• On one of his coding projects, the character added a curiously literary epigraph as a flourish above both of their names.
  — Miles Klee, Rolling Stone, 4 May 2025
• Rilke’s evocation of an animal scared of itself could easily have been the epigraph to Blumstein’s book.
  — Rebecca Giggs, The Atlantic, 5 Oct. 2020
• Maybe the instructor has included a stirring epigraph or a striking image to distinguish theirs from all the others.
  — Hua Hsu, The New Yorker, 22 Oct. 2020
• The book's epigraphs come from directors Peter Brook and Constantin Stanislavski.
  — Kathleen Rooney, chicagotribune.com, 26 June 2017
• From his student days onward, Sebald was a deep reader of Adorno, and the passage might be an epigraph for all Sebald’s writing.
  — James Wood, The New Yorker, 31 May 2017
• That’s the epigraph to Penelope Fitzgerald’s astounding short novel, written toward the end of her life about the beginning of his.
  — Hermione Lee, WSJ, 15 Jan. 2021
• The quotation appears on Pinterest and Tumblr, in articles and epigraphs.
  — Sarah Fay, Longreads, 17 Mar. 2020
• But what those hundreds of pounds of muscle and fur might mean is challenging to see through the dark woods of this intense novel, which begins with an epigraph from the Brothers Grimm.
  — Ron Charles, Washington Post, 18 June 2024
• Irulan is mentioned on the very first page of the novel Dune (her historical writings from decades in the future of the book's events provide an epigraph for almost every chapter), but was absent from last year's film.
  — Christian Holub, EW.com, 8 Mar. 2022
• An opening epigraph from Nietzsche about loneliness and demons suggests a deeper character study that never materializes.
  — Noel Murray, latimes.com, 28 Sep. 2017
• Both versions served as inspiration for Hillary Clinton, who included the original quote as the epigraph to her new memoir, What Happened.
  — Jessica Estepa, USA TODAY, 14 Sep. 2017
• The book is an exhausting typographical obstacle course; that each of its 107 chapters begins with a snippet of poetry as an epigraph does not make reading it any easier.
  — Mike Hale, New York Times, 23 Jan. 2025
• Still’s Afro-American Symphony features spoken epigraphs of Dunbar poems before each movement.
  — Minnita Daniel-Cox, Smithsonian Magazine, 6 Mar. 2023
• Egan also gestures to this paradox by choosing as her epigraph a quote from Herman Melville, who spent most of his life not on the island of Nantucket but on the island of Manhattan.
  — Amor Towles, New York Times, 3 Oct. 2017
• An epigraph offers an observation from Shakespeare’s time—that the names Hamnet and Hamlet were considered interchangeable.
  — David Sims, The Atlantic, 27 Nov. 2025
• The Seed of the Sacred Fig is a half-skeptical lament for the process of tyranny and dissent, as alluded to in the scriptural epigraph about the strangling Ficus religiosa tree that gives the film its title.
  — Armond White, National Review, 22 Jan. 2025
• James’s epigraph is a snapshot of songs from the notebook of Daniel Decatur Emmett, a founder of the first blackface minstrel troupe, a wink at how Jim will play his intelligence to survive amidst his white counterparts.
  — Vulture, 2 Jan. 2024
• The book opens with an epigraph from Eliot, as if to announce that Waldman is explicitly working in the tradition of the big, morally serious social novel that studies delicate textures of human interaction and psychological response.
  — Katy Waldman, The New Yorker, 6 Mar. 2024
• That’s the bitter epigraph that opens this invigorating first episode of Death by Lightning, and one important aspect of the book on which this miniseries is based, Candice Millard’s Destiny of the Republic, is that the 20th president didn’t deserve to be forgotten.
  — Scott Tobias, Vulture, 6 Nov. 2025