Ominous Quotes - Page 3

• William Tavener never heeded ominous forecasts in the domestic horizon, and he never looked for a storm until it broke.

  Willa Cather

  Personality, Storm, Horizon

  Willa Cather (2014). “A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays”, p.42, Simon and Schuster

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• Even more ominous ... is the fact that since the Second World War a new kind of intellectual has emerged in large numbers. ... he is only minimally interested in the proper intellectual significance of images and objects. Such people are not really intellectuals, but visuals ... A visual is more interested in style than in content ... A visual does not feel a rioting crowd being machine-gunned by the police, he simply sees a brilliant news photograph.

  John Fowles

  War, Numbers, People

  "The Aristos: A Self-Portrait in Ideas". Book by John Fowles, 1964.

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• There is that interesting thing that Haughton Forrest was imagining the landscapes. They are so dramatic. They are dark, big, gloomy paintings and he was making them during some of the most ominous massacres in Tasmania. Forrest was recording history but missing the human story.

  Ben Quilty

  Dark, Interesting, Missing

  Source: www.lucyreesart.com

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• A dramatic, evocative, thoughtful and very accessible account of one of the most important stories of the century - and one of the most ominous, unless citizens are aroused to action to rein in abusive state power.

  Noam Chomsky

  Thoughtful, Important, Citizens

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• For Americans war is almost all of the time a nuisance, and military skill is a luxury like Mah-Jongg. But when the issue is brought home to them, war becomes as important, for the necessary period, as business or sport. And it is hard to decide which is likely to be the more ominous for the Axis -- an American decision that this is sport, or that it is business.

  D. W Brogan

  Sports, Military, War

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• Thou ominous and fearful owl of death.

  William Shakespeare

  Death, Owl, Fearful

  William Shakespeare, Michael Taylor (2004). “Henry VI, Part One”, p.200, Oxford University Press, USA

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• In these sad and ominous days of mad fortune chasing, every patriotic, thoughtful citizen, whether he fishes or not, should lament that we have not among our countrymen more fishermen.

  Grover Cleveland

  Patriotic, Thoughtful, Lakes

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• To all new truths, or renovation of old truths, it must be as in the ark between the destroyed and the about-to-be renovated world. The raven must be sent out before the dove, and ominous controversy must precede peace and the olive wreath.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Truth, Ravens, Ark

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1836). “The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge”, p.342

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• You stupefied me. We waxed,
  Carnivores, late and alight
  In the beaded winter. All was ominous, luminous.

  John Ashbery

  Life, Winter, Carnivores

  John Ashbery (1986). “Selected Poems”

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• Nothing worthy can be built on a neglect of higher meanings and on a relativistic view of concepts and culture as a whole. Indeed, something greater than a phenomenon confined to art can be discerned shimmering here beneath the surface - shimmering not with light but with an ominous crimson glow.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Art, Light, Views

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• I want to remember what bullshit looks like when weapons of mass destruction are diagrammed out and whacko "intelligence" is delivered in an ominous way to strike fear into people and especially to pull on the idealism and zeal of the young.

  Louise Erdrich

  Mass Destruction, Bullshit, People

  "Louise Erdrich’s War Of The Roses". Interview with Jeff Vasishta, www.interviewmagazine.com. May 9, 2016.

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• Sunday morning may be cheery enough, with its extra cup of coffee and litter of Sunday newspapers, but there is always hanging over it the ominous threat of 3 P.M., when the sun gets around to the back windows and life stops dead in its tracks.

  Robert Benchley

  Morning, Coffee, Sunday

  Robert Benchley (1946). “One Minute, Please”

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• I never imagined when I wrote my first book on Strauss that the unscrupulous elite that he elevates would ever come so close to political power, nor that the ominous tyranny of the wise would ever come so close to being realised in the political life of a great nation like the United States. But fear is the greatest ally of tyranny.

  Shadia Drury

  Wise, Book, Being Real

  "Noble lies and perpetual war: Leo Strauss, the neocons, and Iraq". Interview with Danny Postel, www.opendemocracy.net. October 15, 2003.

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• But the positive thoughts would give way to negative thoughts, and the negative thoughts seemed to swoop into her mind the way a big flock of black crows takes over the landscape, sitting thick in the trees and on the fence rails and lawns, staring at you in ominous silence.

  Jeannette Walls

  Giving, Silence, Tree

  Jeannette Walls (2009). “The Glass Castle: A Memoir”, p.207, Simon and Schuster

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• There were days when no kid came out of his house without looking around. The week after Halloween had a quality both hungover and ominous, the light pitched, the sky smashed against the rooftops.

  Jonathan Lethem

  Halloween, Kids, Light

  Jonathan Lethem (2004). “The Fortress of Solitude”, p.46, Vintage

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• To say she was my girlfriend was absurd: no one the wrong side of thirty has a girlfriend… I suppose I ought to have realize it’s ominous that forty thousand years of human language had failed to produce a word for our relationship.

  Robert Harris

  Girlfriend, Years, Sides

  Robert Harris (2008). “The Ghost”, p.14, Simon and Schuster

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• This is a strange book: visionary and dark. It stutters out a kind of music: repeated phrases which accumulate errors and mutate as they go like chromosomes or, as Woodward puts it better, 'visible fissile ribbons.' It's as if we were present for the moments of creation and extinction. Uncanny Valley is ominous and beautiful.

  Rae Armantrout

  Beautiful, Book, Dark

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• I'm wondering if there's a spell to make lightning flash in the background whenever I make an ominous resolution.

  Eliezer Yudkowsky

  Lightning, Wonder, Resolution

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• On the political as on the economic front it's important not to fall into the "not as bad as" trap. High unemployment isn't O.K. just because it hasn't hit 1933 levels; ominous political trends shouldn’t be dismissed just because there’s no Hitler in sight.

  Paul Krugman

  Fall, Sight, Political

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• Weapons are ominous tools. They are abhorred by all creatures. Anyone who follows the Way shuns them.

  Laozi

  Taoism, Tools, Weapons

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• Weapons are ominous tools. They are not the noble ruler's tools. He only uses them when he can't avoid it.

  Laozi

  Taoism, Tools, Noble

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• It cannot be denied that for a society which has to create scarcity to save its members from starvation, to whom abundance spells disaster, and to whom unlimited energy means unlimited power for war and destruction, there is an ominous cloud in the distance though at present it be no bigger than a man's hand.

  Arthur Eddington

  War, Distance, Mean

  Arthur Eddington (2012). “New Pathways in Science: Messenger Lectures (1934)”, p.163, Cambridge University Press

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• This massive ascendancy of corporate power over democratic process is probably the most ominous development since the end of World War II, and for the most part "the free world" seems to be regarding it as merely normal.

  Wendell Berry

  War, Development, World

  Wendell Berry (2010). “Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food (Large Print 16pt)”, p.85, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• People just... disappear," he says. "The Earth just opens up and swallows people," I say, some what sadly, checking my Rolex. "Eerie." Kimball yawns, stretching. "Really eerie." "Ominous." I nod my agreement. "It's just"- he sights, exasperated- "futile.

  Bret Easton Ellis

  Sight, Agreement, Eerie

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• The younger and healthier a woman is and the more her new and glossy body seems destined for eternal freshness, the less useful is artifice; but the carnal weakness of this prey that man takes and its ominous deterioration always have to be hidden from him...In any case, the more traits and proportions of a woman seem contrived, the more she delighted the heart of man because she seemed to escape the metamorphosis of natural things. The result is this strange paradox that by desiring to grasp nature, but transfigured, in woman, man destines her to artifice.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Heart, Men, Weakness

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