Quotes About Portent

For people steeped in biblical wonders and supernatural lore, alterations in the night sky, including the aurora borealis in northern latitudes, carried even greater portent.

Skafloc looked at him out of weary eyes. 'Have the Sidhe that many ears?' he asked. 'No,' said Gulban, 'but they know when something of great portent nears

Clever how the cosmos can, in a single portent, be ingratiating yet sadistic.

My mother watched the skies at evening for a portent of the morrow. A cloud that went over and then turned around and came back was an especially bad sign.

A Bad Omen is a warning. A sign to stop and reconsider. Proceed with caution.

Some places speak distinctly. Certain dark gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck.

A name could be either a ghost or a portent depending on which side of time you were standing. The name Whaletown had become a mere specter of the past, a crepuscular Pacific shimmer, but the name Desolation Sound still hovered in the liminal space and felt to her both oracular and haunted.

A name, Ruth thought, could be either a ghost or a portent depending upon which side of time you were standing.

winter morning sun that came from beneath the wooden blinds and marked the new day. Another day. She grew giddy with laughter, convinced as she was, and would remain, that there was portent in his misunderstanding, that their child's life had indeed begun at that hour. Their baby grand, first of four.

APPEARER  (APPE'ARER)   n.s.[from To appear.]The person that appears. That owls and ravens are ominous appearers, and presignify unlucky events, was an augurial conception.Brown'sVul. Err.

To me so deep a silence portends some dread event; a clamorous sorrow wastes itself in sound.

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.

So Grant betook himself through the sunny, busy morning to Waterloo, trailing a little cloud of discontent behind him as he went. As he stepped from the warm pavement into the cool vault of the best but saddest of all London stations—the very name of it reeks of endings and partings—gloom sat on his face like a portent.

The winter was blasting its cold winds of dire portent into the tender face of springtime.

Boy, there's nothing worse than an inscrutable omen.

Speaking so he stirred up Athene, who was eager before this, and she went in a flash of speed down the pinnacles of Olympus. As when the son of devious-devising Kronos casts down a star, portent to sailors or widespread armies of peoples glittering and thickly the sparks of fire break from it, in such likeness Pallas Athene swept flashing earthward

Arnold's 'joke' was too obscenely good not to be taken as a portent: it was the visible part of some huge invisible horror.

He feels like Frodo at the gates of Mordor. Who would have guessed that Ohio could hold such dark portent?

That night the first frost of autumn struck Tucker's Grove. It crept up from the ground, snaring the fragile roots of plants. It emerged from the air, etching its signature on window-panes. A portent. The year was nearing its end. Things would die soon.

Yet unbeknownst to all but a few, storm clouds were gathering on the horizon, and faintly in the distance wise men could hear a rumble of thunder.

we are what meteors, comets, sunspots are to astronomers: monstrous deviations, fell portents of undesired change, proof that something is wrong in a system that was supposedly framed by the hand of God.

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.

Some places speak distinctly. Certain dark gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck.

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.