Best 70 quotes in «foreshadowing quotes» category

Already she knew that an idea could pain him like a bruise. He had grey eyes that showed every thought, and sometimes Charlotte worried that he might be hurt in some way that she would not be able to prevent.

By the end I'll have told you too much and then where will we be?

As you and I listen to Uncle Monty tell the three Baudelaire orphans that no harm will ever come to them in the Reptile Room, we should be experiencing the strange feeling that accompanies the arrival of dramatic irony. This feeling is not unlike the sinking in one's stomach when one is in an elevator that suddenly goes down, or when you are snug in bed and your closet door suddenly creaks open to reveal the person who has been hiding there. For no matter how safe and happy the three children felt, no matter how comforting Uncle Monty's words were, you and I know that soon Uncle Monty will be dead and the Baudelaires will be miserable once again.

Foreshadowing is like playing cat and mouse. If done properly, it can be used to compel the reader to read on.

Coming events do cast shadows.

For Ben, this all had a sinister feeling, the feeling of a darker time about to begin.

He imagines the plane exploding as it touches down, ignited by one of its glints, in a ball of red flame shadowed in black like you see on TV all the time, and he is shocked to find within himself, imagining this, not much emotion, just a cold thrill at being a witness, a kind of bleak wonder at the fury of chemicals, and relief that he hadn't been on the plane himself but was instead safe on this side of the glass, with his faint pronged sense of doom.

Guitar, none of that shit is going to change how I live or how any other Negro lives. What you're doing is crazy. And something else: it's a habit. If you do it enough, you can do it to anybody. You know what I mean? A torpedo is a torpedo, I don't care what his reasons. You can off anybody you don't like. You can off me." "We don't off Negroes." "You hear what you said? Negroes. Not Milkman. Not 'No, I can't touch you, Milkman,' but 'We don't off Negroes.' Shit, man, suppose you all change your parliamentary rules?

He falls asleep believing he's been robbed, not knowing that the summoning of demons is almost always unwitting.

He lifted his glass, smiled over the rim at Eve. And when someone said his name, and he glanced toward them, Eve saw something come into his eyes, just a flash of it. A something she'd only seen when he looked at her. It was gone, shuttered down into polite pleasure. But it had been there. Very slowly, Eve tracked her gaze over, and saw her.

His mother's words faded to myth, concocted by a gentle soul to delight the imagination of a boy. Until one day, they were no longer a myth. One day, he would wish he had never heard them at all because they spelled his happiness--and his eternal sorrow.

I am very, very sorry to leave you hanging like that, but as I was writing the tale of the Baudelaire orphans, I happened to look at the clock and realized I was running late for a formal dinner party given by a friend of mine, Madame diLustro. Madame diLustro is a good friend, an excellent detective, and a fine cook, but she flies into a rage if you arrive even five minutes later than her invitation states, so you understand that I had to dash off. You must have thought, at the end of the previous chapter, that Sunny was dead and that this was the terrible thing that happened to the Baudelaires at Uncle Monty's house, but I promise you Sunny survives this particular episode. It is Uncle Monty, unfortunately, who will be dead, but not yet.

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.

I run into trees all the time when I go sledding

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.

I had no idea what was going on, but I knew that fighting Tybalt wouldn't get me out of the darkness. It would strand me there.

I just hope — if he does come — it won't be some sort of horror show.

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.

I had rather face wild beasts and diseases than the perils of civilization." There is a proverb, which Tom was kind enough not to voice: be careful what you wish for. Unfortunately, not only did I get it, but so did those around me.

I heard, when I was in Delhi, that the men of the West are studying the construction of the atom, and have guessed at the force imprisoned in it. Wait until they have learned how to explode the atom, and then see what they will do to one another.

I now warn the reader not to mock me and my mental daze. It is easy for him and me to decipher now a past destiny; but a destiny in the making is, believe me, not one of those honest mystery stories where all you have to do is keep an eye on the clues. In my youth I once read a French detective tale where the clues were actually in italics; but that is not McFate's way—even if one does learn to recognize certain obscure indications.

Inside, upstairs, where the planes are met, the spaces are long and low and lined in tasteful felt gray like that cocky stewardess's cap and filled with the kind of music you become aware of only when the elevator stops or when the dentist stops drilling. Plucked strings, no vocals, music that's used to being ignored, a kind of carpet in the air, to cover up a silence that might remind you of death.

Maurice laid down all of his cards, then said, Gin. Reginald looked up into Maurice's face and said, I thought we were playing poker and Maurice replied, That's your problem.

It's a Stormwing," Ozorne said. "I always wanted one.

It's a Stromwing," Ozorne said. "I always wanted one.

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.

It was plain that Nazaam and Gieyat were lovers. I'd like that, Arram thought as he followed Nazaam. To be comfortable with my lover, and laugh together, even when things are terrible. Like I do with Ozorne and Varice.

I was resting in the shadow of that ideal happiness as in the shade of the poisonous manchineel tree, without foreseeing the consequences.

Little did I know that today was only the start of everything getting very, very much worse.

MARIA: But unluckily that iron gate, that Ha, Ha, give me a feeling of restraint and hardship. I cannot get out, as the starling said. HENRY: And for the world you would not get out without the key and without Mr. Rushworth's authority and protection, or I think you might with little difficulty pass round the edge of the gate, here, with my assistance; I think it might be done, if you really wished to be more at large, and could allow yourself to think it not prohibited.

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.

It’s weird how much things can change in only a few minutes. With those three words, “I don’t remember,” our entire futures were changed. Not just for me and Brooklyn, but for the little girl, and Denver, and Jenna and Blaze and – darn, I’m getting ahead of myself again. So much for trying to be dramatic.

It was like a commercial for laundry detergent or tampons or a prescription medication with death listed as a possible side effect.

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.

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.

My phone rang, and although it wasn't a sinister time of night, and although nothing had happened that I would later see as foreshadowing, I knew, I knew.

Nightmares are seldom a foreshadowing of real events, but always a showing of real fears.

Nothing happened; yet there were disturbing signs and portents.

Of course, I did not realize it at the time, but it was to be nothing like a year before I came home again. I did not know when I would see Brisbane again, but I knew that I would. Someday. And indeed I did. That is when we found the body in the chapel. But that is a tale for another time.

Safer than being a mouse in a barrel of snakes, that's for sure. Be on the lookout for mice friends, who are really just snakes waiting to shed their skin.

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?

Plot twist: everything goes exactly as planned.

Queer, how I misinterpreted the designations of doom.

Such vows . . . strike one with a sort of horror at what happened afterwards.

She grew daring and reckless, overestimating her strength. She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before.

She saw Luke, standing atop a pile of bones. Jace with white feathered wings sprouting out of his back, Isabelle sitting naked with her whip curled around her like a net of gold rings, Simon with crosses burned into the palms of his hands. Angels, falling and burning. Falling out of the sky.

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.

The first Embassy to Afghanistan by a western power left the Company's Delhi Residency on 13 October 1808, with the Ambassador accompanied by 200 calvary, 4,000 infantry, a dozen elephants and no fewer than 600 camels. It was dazzling, but it was also clear from this attempt to reach out to the Afghans that the British were not interested in cultivating Shah Shuja's friendship for its own sake, but were concerned only to outflank their imperial rivals: the Afghans were perceived as mere pawns on the chessboard of western diplomacy, to be engaged or sacrificed at will. It was a precedent that was to be followed many other times, by several different powers, over the years and decades to come; and each time the Afghans would show themselves capable of defending their inhospitable terrain far more effectively than any of their would-be manipulators could possibly have suspected.

The hounds will come to Cainsville and when they do, you'll wish you made a very different choice today

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.