Portents Quotes

• There are certain events which to each man's life are as comets to the earth, seemingly strange and erratic portents; distinct from the ordinary lights which guide our course and mark our seasons, yet true to their own laws, potent in their own influences.

  Bill Vaughan

  Destiny, Men, Light

  55 Copy quote

• The night ... it is filled with bestial watchmen, trammeling the extremities and the interstices of the timeless city, portents fallen, constellated deities plummeting in ash and smoke, roaming the apocryphal cities, the cities of speculation and reconstituted disorder, of insemination and incipience, swept round with the dark.

  Samuel R. Delany

  Dark, Night, Cities

  53 Copy quote

• Behind the black portent of the new atomic age lies a hope which, seized upon with faith, can work out salvation... Let us not deceive ourselves: we must elect world peace or world destruction.

  Bernard Baruch

  Peace, Work, Lying

  Bernard Baruch's Address to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, June 14, 1946.

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• Self-parody is the first portent of age.

  Larry McMurtry

  Self, Age, Firsts

  Larry McMurtry (2010). “Some Can Whistle”, p.36, Simon and Schuster

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• There is, to be sure, sometimes only a small difference between being alert to possible danger and allowing oneself to become terrified to the point of paralysis by seeming or imagined portents.

  Sherwin B. Nuland

  Differences, Sometimes, Danger

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• They say that in the hour before an earthquake the clouds hang leaden in the sky, the winds slows to a hot breath, and the birds fall quiet in the trees of the town square. Yes but these are the same portents that precede lunchtime, frankly.

  Chris Cleave

  Fall, Clouds, Squares

  Chris Cleave (2012). “Chris Cleave Ebook Boxed Set: Little Bee, Incendiary, Gold”, p.43, Simon and Schuster

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• But it seems to me that a man cannot and ought not to say that he loves, he said. Why not? I asked. Because it will always be a lie. As though it were a strange sort of discovery that someone is in love! Just as if, as soon as he said that, something went snap-bang - he loves. Just as if, when he utters that word, something extraordinary is bound to happen, with signs and portents, and all the cannons firing at once. It seems to me, he went on, that people who solemnly utter those words, 'I love you,' either deceive themselves, or what's still worse, deceive others.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Lying, Love You, Men

  9 Copy quote

• Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times. The dancers don't even look at one another. They are just a lot of isolated individuals jiggling in a kind of self-hypnosis and dancing with others only to remind themselves that we are not completely alone in this world.

  Agnes de Mille

  Hypnosis, Self, Giving

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• As the skies appear to a man, so is his mind. Some see only clouds there; some, prodigies and portents; some rarely look up at all; their heads, like the brutes,' are directed toward Earth. Some behold there serenity, purity, beauty ineffable. The world runs to see the panorama, when there is a panorama in the sky which few go to see.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Running, Men, Clouds

  Henry David Thoreau, Barry Andrews (2005). “True Harvest: Readings from Henry David Thoreau for Every Day of the Year”, p.29, Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations

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• Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times.

  Agnes de Mille

  Dance, Giving, Modern

  9 Copy quote

• Let us not deceive ourselves; we must elect world peace or world destruction.

  Bernard Baruch

  Peace, War, World Destruction

  Bernard Mannes Baruch (1946). “United States atomic energy proposals: Statement of the United States policy on control of atomic energy”

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• Always maintain the attitude of a student. If you think you've done learning, bitterness sets in, but if you have more to achieve every day, in any arena, that makes each morning's awakening full of potential and cheery portent.

  Nick Offerman

  Morning, Attitude, Thinking

  Reddit AMA, www.reddit.com. August 31, 2012.

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• Autumn is the American season. In Europe the leaves turn yellow or brown, and fall. Here they take fire on the trees and hang there flaming. We think this frost-fire is a portent somehow: a promise that the continent has given us. Life, too, we think, is capable of taking fire in this country; of creating beauty never seen.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Country, Fall, Autumn

  4 Copy quote

• How many may a man of diffusive conversation count among his acquaintances, whose lives have been signalized by numberless escapes; who never cross the river but in a storm, or take a journey into the country without more adventures than befel the knights-errant of ancient times in pathless forests or enchanted castles! How many must he know, to whom portents and prodigies are of daily occurrence; and for whom nature is hourly working wonders invisible to every other eye, only to supply them with subjects of conversation?

  Samuel Johnson

  Country, Adventure, Eye

  Samuel Johnson (1825). “The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.”, p.23

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• The V sign is the symbol of the unconquerable will of the occupied territories, and a portent of the fate awaiting the Nazi tyranny.

  Winston Churchill

  Fate, Victory, Unconquerable Will

  Message to people of Europe launching V for Victory propaganda campaign, 20 July 1941

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• I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken,
  I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children,
  And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
  It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

  Bob Dylan

  Children, Rain, Fall

  'A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall' (1963 song)

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• The phantom-host has faded quite, Splendor and Terror gone-- Portent or promise--and gives way To pale, meek Dawn.

  Herman Melville

  Giving, Promise, Way

  Herman Melville (1866). “Battle-pieces and aspects of the war [poems].”, p.148

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• In one sense what may pass between the pope and myself may be trivialities. In another sense the fact of talking trivialities is itself a portent of great significance. But the pleasantries which we exchange may, as one church leader said, be pleasantries about profundities.

  Geoffrey Fisher

  Talking, Leader, Church

  6 Copy quote

• .... Anon from the castle walls The crescent banner falls, And the crowd beholds instead, Like a portent in the sky, Iskander's banner fly, The Black Eagle with double head. And shouts ascend on high .....'' Long live Scanderbeg.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Wall, Fall, Eagles

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Horace Elisha Scudder (1922). “The Complete Poetical Works of Longfellow”

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• During the 1960s, the Shanghai of my childhood seemed a portent of the media cities of the future, dominated by advertising and mass circulation newspapers and swept by unpredictable violence.

  J. G. Ballard

  Media, Cities, Childhood

  "Look back at Empire" by JG Ballard, www.theguardian.com. March 3, 2006.

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• When something out of the ordinary happens, it is ridiculous to say that it is a mystery or a portent of something to come... the mystery is created in (their) minds, and by waiting for disaster, it is from their very minds that it occurs.

  Yamamoto Tsunetomo

  War, Waiting, Mind

  Miyamoto Musashi, Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Inazo Nitobe (2010). “Honor: Samurai Philosophy of Life - The Essential Samurai Collection; The Book of Five Rings, Hagakure: The Way of the Samurai, Bushido: The Soul of Japan.”, p.64, Bottom of the Hill

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• Mene mene tekel upsharin,' Jace said with a faint smile. 'You don't recognize it? It's from the Bible, vampire. The old one. That's your book, isn't it?' Just because I'm Jewish doesn't mean I've memorized the Old Testament.' It's the Writing on the Wall. "God hath numbered thy kingdom, and brought it to an end; thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting." It's a portent of doom--it means the end of an empire.

  Cassandra Clare

  Art, Wall, Book

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• Zombies are then a symbol of our own mad urges to destroy ourselves, and a terrifying portent that we might succeed.

  Kim Paffenroth

  Mad, Zombie, Might

  Kim Paffenroth (2006). “Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero's Visions of Hell on Earth”, p.3, Baylor University Press

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• It began as most thing begin. Not on a dark and stormy night. Not foreshadowed by ominous here comes the villain music, dire warning at the bottom of a teacup, or dread portents in the sky. It began small and innocuously, as most catastrophes do. A butterfly flaps its wings somewhere and the wind changes, and a warm front hits a cold front off the coast of western Africa and before you know it you’ve got an hurricane closing in. By the time anyone figured out the storm was coming, it was too late to do anything but batten down the hatches and exercise damage control.

  Karen Marie Moning

  Butterfly, Exercise, Dark

  FaceBook post by Karen Marie Moning from Jun 06, 2013

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• Rivers are roads that move and carry us whither we wish to go.
  [Fr., Les rivieres sont des chemins qui marchant et qui portent ou l'on veut aller.]

  Blaise Pascal

  Moving, Rivers, Wish

  14 Copy quote