A Quote by Dante Alighieri

In that book which is my memory, On the first page of the chapter that is the day when I first met you, Appear the words, ‘Here begins a new life’. — © Dante Alighieri
In that book which is my memory, On the first page of the chapter that is the day when I first met you, Appear the words, ‘Here begins a new life’.
If you take a book with you on a journey," Mo had said when he put the first one in her box, "an odd thing happens: The book begins collecting your memories. And forever after you have only to open that book to be back where you first read it. It will all come into your mind with the very first words: the sights you saw in that place, what it smelled like, the ice cream you ate while you were reading it... yes, books are like flypaper—memories cling to the printed page better than anything else.
I would look at the first chapter of any new novel as a final test of its merits. If there was a murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I read the story. If there was no murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I dismissed the story as tea-table twaddle, which it often really was.
When I'm deciding to read a book, I never open to the first chapter, because that's been revised and worked over 88 times. I'll just turn to the middle of the book, to the middle of a chapter, and just read a random page and I'll know right away whether this is the real deal or not.
In that part of the book of my memory before which little can be read, there is a heading, which says: ‘Incipit vita nova: Here begins the new life’.
The first day I met Peep we made a song without question. Never in my life have I connected with someone like that. Literally the first day we met we recorded 'White Tee' and shot the video.
Don't close the book when bad things happen in your life! Just turn the page and start a new chapter!
Writing the first draft of a new story is incredibly difficult for me. I will happily do revisions, because once I can see the words on the page, I can go about ripping them up and moving scenes around. A blank page, though? Terrifying. I'm always angsty when I'm working my way through a first draft.
Write every day. Don't kill yourself. I think a lot of people think, 'I have to write a chapter a day' and they can't. They fall behind and stop doing it. But if you just write even one hundred words a day, it's not that much. By the end of a month, you'll have three thousand words, which is one chapter.
Every day you live is a page. Every year, a chapter. Your life, a book. What is it about?
The two mistakes that come to mind are people who introduce a flood of characters in the first few pages. Where the reader has to stop and get out a flow chart and has to figure out who is who. And you just can't do that - introduce the first four generations of a character's family in the first chapter. You can introduce four or five characters at the most in the first chapter. Another mistake is to use big words that are not normally used in conversation to try to impress folks with your vocabulary.
Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
All their life in this world and all their adventures had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.
Usually, when people get to the end of a chapter, they close the book and go to sleep. I deliberately write a book so when the reader gets to the end of the chapter, he or she must turn one more page.
My novel, which I had started with such hope shortly after publishing my first book of stories, wouldn't budge past the 75-page mark. Nothing I wrote past page 75 made any kind of sense. Nothing. Which would have been fine if the first 75 pages hadn't been pretty damn cool.
Lots of people can write a good first page but to sustain it, that's my litmus test. If I flip to the middle of the book and there's a piece of dialogue that's just outstanding, or a description, then I'll flip back to the first page and start it.
Marriage is a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.
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