Foreshadowing Quotes

“By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“If you die you’re completely happy and your soul somewhere lives on. I’m not afraid of dying. Total peace after death, becoming someone else is the best hope I’ve got.”
― Kurt Cobain

“To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing -- the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

“Beware the ides of March.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

“I do the very best I know how, the very best I can, and I mean to keep on doing so until the end.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“Whatever house I'm in, I hope she's not in it.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

“The streets are empty. Wind skims the voids keeping neighbors apart, as if grazing the hollow of a cut reed, or say, a plundered mailbox. A familiar note is produced. It's the one Desolation plays to keep its instrument in tune.”
― Andrew Hussie, Homestuck Book One

“For most of my life I've been a listener. At least in the beginning, I think the reason I listened so intently was to have a chance of hearing the train before it ran over me.”
― Steve Rasnic Tem

“A shell in the pit," said I, "if the worst comes to worst will kill them all."

The intense excitement of the events had no doubt left my perceptive powers in a state of erethism. I remember that dinner table with extraordinary vividness even now. My dear wife's sweet anxious face peering at me from under the pink lampshade, the white cloth with it silver and glass table furniture—for in those days even philosophical writers had luxuries—the crimson-purple wine in my glass, are photographically distinct. At the end of it I sat, tempering nuts with a cigarette, regretting Ogilvy's rashness, and denouncing the shortsighted timidity of the Martians.

So some respectable dodo in the Mauritius might have lorded it in his nest, and discussed the arrival of that shipful of pitiless sailors in want of animal food. "We will peck them to death tomorrow, my dear.”
― H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

“Unintentional foreshadowing is unintentionally hilarious.”
― Sarah Wendell

“Queer, how I misinterpreted the designations of doom.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“How many more times would I have embraced him that night, how many more times would I have kissed him, if I had known the name of that stranger lover who was already in Montreal, who had already bought his stadium ticket from a scalper for the 5,000 tomorrow.
That implacable lover who was going to turn Billy's eyes away from me forever.”
― Patricia Nell Warren, The Front Runner

“I run into trees all the time when I go sledding”
― Geoffrey Rogers

“Mr. St. Maur will help me make a most excellent match. Perhaps you should retain him as well."
Minerva shook her head at the pair of them. "A man will have to fall out of the sky and into my bedroom before I marry him.”
― Elizabeth Boyle, Mad about the Duke

“The boys were dancing. The pile was so rotten, and now so tinder-dry, that whole limbs yielded passionately to the yellow flames that poured upwards and shook a great beards of flame twenty feet in the air. For yards round the fire the heat was like a blow, and the breeze was a river of sparks. Trunks crumbled to a white dust.”
― William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“The man looked up at the dangling, buzzing lightbulb, then turned to his partner. " You know who invented those things right? Maybe we should call this one Thomas. " And then they left.”
― James Dasher

“For Ben, this all had a sinister feeling, the feeling of a darker time about to begin.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“I just hope — if he does come — it won't be some sort of horror show.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Message to the Planet

“It was for me a moment of great peace. I did not know then that it was the last, the very last moment of peace, the end of the old innocent world, the final moment before I was plunged into the nightmare of which these ensuing pages tell the story.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

“Such vows . . . strike one with a sort of horror at what happened afterwards.”
― Anne Somerset, Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion

“It’s funny about people. Just before something happens, you almost know what it is. You do know what it is, I believe. You just haven’t had the time—and now you won’t have the time—to say it to yourself.”
― James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk

“Nothing happened; yet there were disturbing signs and portents.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“If at that moment Clement had caught sight of the dog and had managed to capture him, the fates of a number of people in this story would have been entirely different. Such is the vast play of chance in human lives.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“I'm working on a poem about heartbreak that I've been working on forever (give or take). The problem is that I've never had my heart broken, so I'm having a hard time.”
― Nicola Yoon, The Sun Is Also a Star

“Or did I know by intuition that wonderful and terrible things were really imminent at last, trembling into being just behind the curtain of the future?”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Coming events do cast shadows.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“The morning brought the crisis of my life. But it was not anything that I could have conceived of in my wildest imaginings.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“What happened after that, and will be related later, was something entirely unexpected and so awful that Ludens had never spoken about it afterwards to anyone.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Message to the Planet

“By the end I'll have told you too much and then where will we be?”
― Dez Schwartz, Roam

“Look!” The Khwaja nudged a sleepy Bizhad. What was white before sparkled with a fine glaze of crimson, smearing the ashen tents that housed soldiers and animals inside the fort’s walls, lighting up the city of palaces and mosques, casting a halo over the silent fountains and the imperial boat. One by one, the great doorways of the fort gleamed like mirrors, reflecting the sun, now a spear’s length over the horizon. Marble palaces breathed free of the crisscrossing beams, managing to stand aloof from common homes. The intruder, satisfied by the result, turned an effortless gold – a gold coin floating on the river, at its still centre.

A bird called, flew across, reflecting the world on its tiny wings – the lapis sky, the turquoise river, the crimson fort and the golden sun. “Look!” The Khwaja whispered into Bizhad’s ear, tracing its flight with his raised finger. “The finest artist in all Agra!”

And so on Saturday the twenty-seventh of Rabi, year 975 of the Hegira, 1568 of the Christian era, the sun lit imperial Agra, blessing every moment and delighting every one of its subjects. It rose for the ten thousandth time since that dawn when Babur, the Mughal invader, had woken after a restful night to find himself the conqueror of Hindustan. Under the western wall of the fort, his grandson, the emperor, was about to rise. Rise and begin his favorite sport – racing elephants when they are in their frightening best. In heat.”
― Kunal Basu, The Miniaturist