Quotes About Portents

#1. He was now a husband and father, and they had not been in touch in years, yet she could not pretend that he was not a part of her homesickness, or that she did not often think of him, sifting through their past, looking for portents of what she could not name.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#2. He knew that again now. Hennessey's death had opened to Croft vistas of such omnipotence that he was afraid to consider it directly. All day the fact hovered about his head, tantalizing him with odd dreams and portents of power.

Norman Mailer

#3. 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

#4. From those humble beginnings we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid.

Peter Watts

#5. We may be undermined by our survival instincts, honed over eons to help us deny, defy, or ignore catastrophic portents lest they paralyze us with fright.

Alan Weisman

#6. They say that eclipses are portents of disaster, because disasters are so common, and misfortune occurs often enough for these forecasts to be right, whereas if they said that eclipses were portents of good fortune they would often be wrong.

Blaise Pascal

#7. Still, the best augurs are those who divine from the portents of the past. They compile phenomenal records.

Glen Cook

#8. 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

#9. He didn't like the way things were going.
There were bad omens in the wind, evil portents like bats fluttering in the dark loft of a deserted barn.

Stephen King

#10. I want limits, damn it. I'll accept omens and portents and second sight. I'll accept giant black hounds and creepy ravens and magpies. I'm still working out the fae and Wild Hunt thing. But I draw the line at people disappearing into thin air.

Kelley Armstrong

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. Background radiation spoke to Holden in mystic whispers full of dire portents while he waited. Newcomer, it said. Hang around for fourteen billion years or so. See what I've seen. Then all this nonsense won't seem so important. I'll

James S.A. Corey

#14. In the zone of perdition where my youth went as if to complete its education, one would have said that the portents of an imminent collapse of the whole edifice of civilization had made an appointment.

Guy Debord

#15. I had long ago learned to ignore things I could not resolve. Whenever I was faced with such choices, something always occured to tip the scales one way or another and relieve me of the decision.
I watched the skies for portents from the Gods.

W.A. Hoffman

#16. Life is so full of portents and signs and symbols that it's a wonder not everyone is a writer.

Susan Juby

#17. To be a poet, I realized, a true poet, was to become the Avatar of humanity incarnate; to accept the mantle of poet is to carry the cross of the Son of Man, to suffer the birth pangs of the Soul-Mother of Humanity.

Dan Simmons

#18. When a portent repeats itself three times, like something out of Julius Caesar, even Caliban, a couple of plays over, is bound to notice.

Karen Joy Fowler

#19. She was every inch the skeletal goddess that had been promised by the bones of her feet.

Jefferson Smith

#20. Man is the most powerful creature on the planet. And we're arrogant. I mean, people own birds. It's like, there's a creature with the gift of flight. I want it. I'm going to put it in my kitchen and make it crap on old information.

Demetri Martin

#21. In the murky puddle of rainwater collected at the entrance of the tomb, I spied my own reflection,a dark, hatted figure against a pewter sky.

Linda Lappin

#22. I love music, and I love acting, so if I can just live and be able to do those two things, I can be happy, you know?

Craig Horner

#23. The whole Bible is the story of men and women trying to get back to God, to overcome that sin with sacrifices, good works, sermons, prophesy, witnessing, giving all kinds of things. It never worked.

Keith Miller

#24. If you think there's a thing - anything - women didn't do in the past, you're wrong.

Kameron Hurley

#25. There was a blinding flash of magnesium and a smell of singed hair and dust. A green light flared in the boar's glass eye.

Linda Lappin

#26. Obviously, the music and lyrics are in me, but if I let myself get in my own way, I do. I empty out and let it come, and then the music spirits take over.

Joan Jett

#27. Time and time again we forget all too easily that nonviolent action embraces a wide and imaginative range of behavior which can always be stepped up.

Petra Kelly