Portentous Quotes

#1. Could unsheathe from her arsenal a mockingly grave way of talking about things she found either portentous or frivolous. She could shrink your aspirations before your very eyes.

Khaled Hosseini

#2. Heavy gold watch-chain, with a bundle of seals of portentous size, and a great variety of colors, attached to it, - which, in the ardor of conversation, he was in the habit of flourishing and jingling with evident satisfaction. His conversation was in free and easy defiance of

Harriet Beecher Stowe

#3. Forth from his dark and lonely hiding-place, (Portentous sight!) the owlet Atheism, sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon, drops his blue-fringed lids, and holds them close, and hooting at the glorious sun in Heaven, cries out, 'Where is it?'

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#4. In the middle of the sixteenth century, Spain was the incubus of Europe. Gloomy and portentous, she chilled the world with her baneful shadow.

Francis Parkman

#5. And private in his chamber pens himself,
Shuts up his windows, locks fair daylight out,
And makes himself an artificial night.
Black and portentous must this humor prove

William Shakespeare

#6. For this reason the gravest question before the Church is always God Himself, and the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he is his deep heart conceives God to be like.

A.W. Tozer

#7. The lieutenant, returning from a tour after a bandage, produced from a hidden receptacle of his mind new and portentous oaths suited to the emergency. Strings of expletives he swung lashlike over the backs of his men, and it was evident that his previous efforts had in nowise impaired his resources.

Stephen Crane

#8. Of all the horrid, hideous notes of woe, Sadder than owl-songs or the midnight blast; Is that portentous phrase, I told you so.

Lord Byron

#9. Carved above the lintel were the words SCIENTIA POTESTAS EST. Science points east, I wondered? Science is portentous, yes? Science protests too much. Scientific potatoes rule. Had I stumbled on the lair of dangerous plant geneticists?

Ben Aaronovitch

#10. Oh, how portentous is prosperity! How comet-like, it threatens while it shines.

Edward Young

#11. (Uncle) would remark that it was impossible to get by without such a (portentous and whimsical) tone when speaking of many things of this world, and especially of the things not entirely of this world.

Vladimir Odoevsky

#12. Slender certainty is better than portentous falsehood.

Leonardo Da Vinci

#13. So it is best for you to withdraw into the world of your portents, for there at least you can decide yourself how portentous they are.

Umberto Eco

#14. Furthermore, the initial page, always crucial, passed every test, with its promises and divisions, its portentous opening paragraph like the great door of a church, its exotic setting and strange names, the rolling orchestration of its prose.

William H Gass

#15. I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#16. Black and portentous must this humour46 prove, Unless good counsel may the cause remove. [140] Benvolio

William Shakespeare

#17. The sun, an hour above the horizon, is poised like a bloody egg upon a crest of thunderheads; the light has turned copper: in the eye portentous, in the nose sulphurous, smelling of lightning.

William Faulkner

#18. The genius of Cornell is that he sees and enables us to see with the eyes of childhood, before our vision got clouded by experience, when objects like a rubber ball or a pocket mirror seemed charged with meaning, and a marble rolling across a wooden floor could be as portentous as a passing comet.

John Ashbery

#19. All beyond this is portentous and fabulous, inhabited by poets and mythologers, and there is nothing true or certain.

Plutarch

#20. What is the big political issue for Britain at the moment? Without wishing to sound portentous, it is about whether we can build a social democratic settlement, whether we can lay the political and cultural foundations for the next several years.

David Miliband

#21. The truth, when finally revealed, is sticky like wet dough. The majority of it stays in place as one handles it, but pieces break off and adhere, making certain facts seem larger, more portentous, than others.

Angela Flournoy

#22. I meant of course the whole portentous scrimmage of sex itself, the act of penetration which could lead a man to despair for the sake of a creature with two breasts and le croissant as the picturesque Levant slang has it.

Lawrence Durrell

#23. I was a boss on 'Cavemen.' That was portentous.

Stephanie Courtney

#24. I know now, like drumbeats. Portentous, and a little sinister, like tympani strikes at the start of a gloomy symphony. Shostakovich, maybe.

Lee Child

#25. We gazed at the constellations, praising the portentous architecture of the sky with trite formulas.

Elena Ferrante

#26. Best beauty tip ... Work yourself from the inside out. Eat right, drink right, look right!
Positive energy brings a certain glow, so think positive, choose positive, be positive & attract positiveness. It always shows up on the outside.

Mya

#27. The only thing worse than being exploited by capitalism is not being exploited by capitalism.

Joan Robinson

#28. Sorry Pa, I managed to finally say, choking on my own words. It was the hardest apology I have ever made in my life.
I truly meant it. But I had no words left to convey its depth.

Preeti Shenoy

#29. I've found that when one us searching for danger, it's never hard to find.

Rick Riordan

#30. Here, no mercy is shown. One hates one's fellow man to the glory of God.

Selma Lagerlof

#31. I wait on my fix:
I am a poetry junkie.

Charles Bukowski

#32. A good starting point [in the measurement of investment risk] is the preservation and enhancement of your purchasing power in real terms.

David Dreman

#33. Science?is so greatly opposed to history and tradition that it cannot be absorbed by our civilization.

Max Born

#34. Our world has lost its sense of wonder.

Brennan Manning