Regarding quotes or poem lines, they ask permission for those. - Edit 1
Before modification by Legolas at 05/01/2012 07:48:58 PM
In terms of direct quotes/paragraphs- authors actually do this a lot with works that are in the public domain. It's pretty common to have a quote or a poem written by someone who died long ago at the beginning of a chapter. That's not a parody...
You can easily see this in authors who do a lot of it, for instance having a quote at the beginning of every single chapter (like Cornelia Funke in her popular YA series "Inkworld" ). There's pages and pages listing where all the quotes were taken from and mentioning that the respective copyright holders graciously granted their permission to use them. Except of course for those works that are in the public domain.