Every manuscript that quotes anything runs into this eventually. You have a quotation to set, Markdown has exactly one thing that indents text, and it is not obvious whether the epigraph under your chapter title, the paragraph you are citing three pages later, and the sentence you want blown up in the margin are the same construct wearing different clothes. They are not.
Three things that look alike
| What it is | Whose words | Where it sits | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Block quote | A passage quoted inside your text | Someone else's | In the flow, where you discuss it |
| Epigraph | A quotation that opens a chapter or the book | Someone else's | Under the chapter title, before the first line |
| Pull quote | A line lifted out and enlarged | Yours, from this page | Beside or between paragraphs, as decoration |
The distinction that matters is the last column. A block quote is part of the argument and the reader must read it. An epigraph is a threshold — read once, before the chapter starts. A pull quote is a repeat of something already on the page, which means a reader who skips it loses nothing, and that is exactly what makes it decoration rather than content.
Block quotes: the default case
Markdown's > marker is a block quote and nothing else. One > at the start of each line, a blank line before and after, and paragraphs inside it separated by a > on its own line.
As Strunk put it plainly:
> Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no
> unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences.
>
> This requires not that the writer make all his sentences
> short, but that every word tell.
The advice survives its own compression, which is the test.In print a block quote is set apart from the body text rather than decorated. The conventional treatment is an indent on the left — sometimes both sides — a size one or two points smaller than the body, and slightly more space above and below than a normal paragraph gets. What it should not have is quotation marks: the indentation is already saying it is a quotation, and doing both is saying it twice.
- No quote marks around it. The setting does that job.
- Same typeface as the body, usually. Switching to italic for a long quote makes it harder to read, not more distinguished.
- Only for passages of about forty words or more. A short quotation belongs inline, in quote marks, in your own sentence.
- Ragged right is fine even in a justified book — a narrow measure justifies badly, which is the whole argument in justified versus ragged right.
The attribution line
The source goes on its own line at the end of the quote, inside the block, prefixed with an em dash. Keeping it inside the > matters: it is part of the quotation unit, and a converter that sets it as a normal paragraph will break the page between the quote and its source at the worst possible moment.
> Vigorous writing is concise.
>
> — William Strunk Jr., *The Elements of Style*Conventionally the attribution is set flush right or with a hanging indent, one size down from the quote, and it is not italicised except for the work's title. A full citation — publisher, year, page — belongs in a footnote or the endmatter rather than under the quote, which is one of the arguments for footnotes over inline citations in a book meant to be read rather than checked.
Epigraphs
An epigraph is a quotation placed at the head of a chapter, or at the head of the whole book, before anything else. It is not part of the chapter's argument. It sets a tone, and then the chapter starts as if it were not there.
## Chapter Three
> The past is never dead. It's not even past.
>
> — William Faulkner
The archive had been in the basement since 1974, which is where
this chapter begins.Typographically an epigraph is a block quote with more air and less width: set narrower than the text block, often indented from both sides, with generous space between it and the first paragraph so the reader registers a pause. Some books italicise them; most do not need to, because the position already says what it is.
- One per chapter at most. Two epigraphs at the head of a chapter is an anthology, not a threshold.
- Keep them short. Three lines is plenty. A half-page epigraph is a reader deciding whether to skip your chapter before it has started.
- They never break across a page. An epigraph split over a page turn has failed at the one job it had.
- Check the permissions. Song lyrics and living poets are the two categories that generate letters. Short prose quotations for comment are usually fine; a stanza of a copyrighted poem often is not.
Pull quotes, and why books mostly do not use them
A pull quote takes a sentence already on the page and sets it large, in the margin or between paragraphs, to catch a browsing eye. It is a magazine device, and it is there because magazines are scanned rather than read. A book is read in sequence, from the top, by someone who has already decided to be there.
Which is why a pull quote in a novel looks strange and a pull quote in a business book looks like a slide. Where they genuinely earn their place is the middle ground — a lead magnet, a workbook, a report — where the reader is skimming for whether it is worth their time.
| Format | Pull quotes? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Novel | No | Nothing is being scanned |
| Narrative non-fiction | Rarely | It interrupts a line of argument |
| Business or self-help | Sometimes | Chapters are often read out of order |
| Lead magnet or report | Yes | The reader is deciding whether to continue |
| Reflowable EPUB | No | There is no fixed page to place it on |
What breaks in EPUB
Block quotes and epigraphs survive the trip to a reflowable format cleanly, because both are defined by indentation and spacing rather than by position on a page. Pull quotes do not: there is no margin to sit in, no spread to be beside, and a reader with a large font will meet the enlarged sentence directly above the paragraph it was lifted from.
- Block quote: fine. Indent and size come through as styles.
- Epigraph: fine, and it is worth checking it does not land alone at the bottom of a screen.
- Attribution line: fine if it is inside the quote. Outside it, it can separate.
- Pull quote: drop it, or accept it renders as a large duplicated sentence. This is one of the real differences between EPUB and PDF, rather than a styling problem to be solved.
Nesting, and verse
A quotation inside a quotation is >>, and it is worth avoiding in a book — two levels of indent read as a formatting mistake to anyone who has not been following closely. If someone you are quoting quotes someone else, single quote marks inside the block are clearer than a second indent.
Verse is the case where the indentation is load-bearing. Line breaks inside a quoted stanza have to be preserved exactly, which means explicit line breaks rather than trusting a paragraph to wrap — the same problem, and the same solution, as setting a poetry book from Markdown.
Everything above is one construct used three ways, which is the general shape of writing a book in Markdown: the file records what a thing is, and the design decides what it looks like. That separation is what lets the same manuscript come out as a print PDF with epigraphs sitting in white space and as an EPUB that reflows to whatever screen it lands on.