Ominous Quotes - Page 3

• Sunday morning may be cheery enough, with its extra cup of coffee and litter of Sunday newspapers, but there is always hanging over it the ominous threat of 3 P.M., when the sun gets around to the back windows and life stops dead in its tracks.

  Robert Benchley

  Morning, Coffee, Sunday

  Robert Benchley (1946). “One Minute, Please”

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• In general, American life is more easy-going. And civic pride, national pride in a cultural sense, is great in America. I think what they esteem in America is character and energy, and being different and superior to other peoples. Of course, every nation feels itself to be superior, but in America it's a jaunty feeling, and in some cases a rather ominous one among the super-patriots.

  James Salter

  Character, Pride, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• A dramatic, evocative, thoughtful and very accessible account of one of the most important stories of the century - and one of the most ominous, unless citizens are aroused to action to rein in abusive state power.

  Noam Chomsky

  Thoughtful, Important, Citizens

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• You can't afford to make the shark look good so you do most of it with ominous music and a fin.

  Jim Howick

  Sharks, Looks, Fins

  Source: www.denofgeek.com

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• I want to remember what bullshit looks like when weapons of mass destruction are diagrammed out and whacko "intelligence" is delivered in an ominous way to strike fear into people and especially to pull on the idealism and zeal of the young.

  Louise Erdrich

  Mass Destruction, Bullshit, People

  "Louise Erdrich’s War Of The Roses". Interview with Jeff Vasishta, www.interviewmagazine.com. May 9, 2016.

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• There is that interesting thing that Haughton Forrest was imagining the landscapes. They are so dramatic. They are dark, big, gloomy paintings and he was making them during some of the most ominous massacres in Tasmania. Forrest was recording history but missing the human story.

  Ben Quilty

  Dark, Interesting, Missing

  Source: www.lucyreesart.com

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• Even more ominous ... is the fact that since the Second World War a new kind of intellectual has emerged in large numbers. ... he is only minimally interested in the proper intellectual significance of images and objects. Such people are not really intellectuals, but visuals ... A visual is more interested in style than in content ... A visual does not feel a rioting crowd being machine-gunned by the police, he simply sees a brilliant news photograph.

  John Fowles

  War, Numbers, People

  "The Aristos: A Self-Portrait in Ideas". Book by John Fowles, 1964.

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• To all new truths, or renovation of old truths, it must be as in the ark between the destroyed and the about-to-be renovated world. The raven must be sent out before the dove, and ominous controversy must precede peace and the olive wreath.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Truth, Ravens, Ark

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1836). “The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge”, p.342

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• In these sad and ominous days of mad fortune chasing, every patriotic, thoughtful citizen, whether he fishes or not, should lament that we have not among our countrymen more fishermen.

  Grover Cleveland

  Patriotic, Thoughtful, Lakes

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• For Americans war is almost all of the time a nuisance, and military skill is a luxury like Mah-Jongg. But when the issue is brought home to them, war becomes as important, for the necessary period, as business or sport. And it is hard to decide which is likely to be the more ominous for the Axis -- an American decision that this is sport, or that it is business.

  D. W Brogan

  Sports, Military, War

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• I never imagined when I wrote my first book on Strauss that the unscrupulous elite that he elevates would ever come so close to political power, nor that the ominous tyranny of the wise would ever come so close to being realised in the political life of a great nation like the United States. But fear is the greatest ally of tyranny.

  Shadia Drury

  Wise, Book, Being Real

  "Noble lies and perpetual war: Leo Strauss, the neocons, and Iraq". Interview with Danny Postel, www.opendemocracy.net. October 15, 2003.

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• Thou ominous and fearful owl of death.

  William Shakespeare

  Death, Owl, Fearful

  William Shakespeare, Michael Taylor (2004). “Henry VI, Part One”, p.200, Oxford University Press, USA

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• You stupefied me. We waxed,
  Carnivores, late and alight
  In the beaded winter. All was ominous, luminous.

  John Ashbery

  Life, Winter, Carnivores

  John Ashbery (1986). “Selected Poems”

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• To say she was my girlfriend was absurd: no one the wrong side of thirty has a girlfriend… I suppose I ought to have realize it’s ominous that forty thousand years of human language had failed to produce a word for our relationship.

  Robert Harris

  Girlfriend, Years, Sides

  Robert Harris (2008). “The Ghost”, p.14, Simon and Schuster

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• This massive ascendancy of corporate power over democratic process is probably the most ominous development since the end of World War II, and for the most part "the free world" seems to be regarding it as merely normal.

  Wendell Berry

  War, Development, World

  Wendell Berry (2010). “Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food (Large Print 16pt)”, p.85, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• This is a strange book: visionary and dark. It stutters out a kind of music: repeated phrases which accumulate errors and mutate as they go like chromosomes or, as Woodward puts it better, 'visible fissile ribbons.' It's as if we were present for the moments of creation and extinction. Uncanny Valley is ominous and beautiful.

  Rae Armantrout

  Beautiful, Book, Dark

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• People just... disappear," he says. "The Earth just opens up and swallows people," I say, some what sadly, checking my Rolex. "Eerie." Kimball yawns, stretching. "Really eerie." "Ominous." I nod my agreement. "It's just"- he sights, exasperated- "futile.

  Bret Easton Ellis

  Sight, Agreement, Eerie

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• Nobody wants to know a colored woman's opinion about her own status of that of her group. When she dares express it, no matter how mild or tactful it may be, it is called 'propaganda,' or is labeled 'controversial.' Those two words have come to have a very ominous sound to me.

  Mary Church Terrell

  Two, Black, Want

  Mary Church Terrell (1986). “A Colored Woman in a White World”

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• But the positive thoughts would give way to negative thoughts, and the negative thoughts seemed to swoop into her mind the way a big flock of black crows takes over the landscape, sitting thick in the trees and on the fence rails and lawns, staring at you in ominous silence.

  Jeannette Walls

  Giving, Silence, Tree

  Jeannette Walls (2009). “The Glass Castle: A Memoir”, p.207, Simon and Schuster

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• What's great about New York is that there are a lot of theater actors and actresses, who are trained actors, that they bring onto the show. They're so talented, in such a weird, quirky and ominous way. And it's great to be able to work with new faces, too.

  Natalie Zea

  New York, Quirky, Able

  Source: collider.com

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• On the political as on the economic front it's important not to fall into the "not as bad as" trap. High unemployment isn't O.K. just because it hasn't hit 1933 levels; ominous political trends shouldn’t be dismissed just because there’s no Hitler in sight.

  Paul Krugman

  Fall, Sight, Political

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• I'm wondering if there's a spell to make lightning flash in the background whenever I make an ominous resolution.

  Eliezer Yudkowsky

  Lightning, Wonder, Resolution

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• Great griefs exhaust. They discourage us with life. The man into whom they enter feels something taken from him. In youth, their visit is sad; later on, it is ominous.

  Victor Hugo

  Grief, Taken, Men

  Victor Hugo (2007). “Hugo's Works: Les Miserables (St. Denis)”, p.379, Wildside Press LLC

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• Increasingly, I wonder if there are any outrages that would be sufficiently ominous in their effects upon liberty and unequivocal in their moral perversity to awaken the American people to the tyrannical spirit that envelopes the Clinton White House.

  Alan Keyes

  White, People, House

  "New barbarians". mobile.wnd.com. May 6, 2000.

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• The younger and healthier a woman is and the more her new and glossy body seems destined for eternal freshness, the less useful is artifice; but the carnal weakness of this prey that man takes and its ominous deterioration always have to be hidden from him...In any case, the more traits and proportions of a woman seem contrived, the more she delighted the heart of man because she seemed to escape the metamorphosis of natural things. The result is this strange paradox that by desiring to grasp nature, but transfigured, in woman, man destines her to artifice.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Heart, Men, Weakness

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