Foreshadowing Quotes

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

“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

“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

“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

“When misfortune has thrown us a curveball, and the tentacles of desperation are freezing our mind, foreshadowing a hustle-bustle of confusion, we must inflame the power of our imagination. Let us take a walk on the path of groundbreaking change, take daring initiatives, and create a scheme of inventive intentions, gradually paving the way to a new setting, assessing each stage thoughtfully. ("Check and mate")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“The worst moments in life are heralded by small observations.”
― Andy Weir, The Martian

“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.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“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

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

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

“Unintentional foreshadowing is unintentionally hilarious.”
― Sarah Wendell

“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

“That it’ll-never-come-again felt so ominous, so striking!
If words were measured like temperature, they’d feel as cold as a planet with no sun.”
― Misba, The High Auction

“Kusha forces the thought away. Some things shouldn’t be downloaded even as subconscious alarms, she thinks. Two prophetic alarms are enough for one morning, she believes.
But if she wanted, if she pondered a bit more on the thought, if she focused on her alarms, she could’ve caught another important prophecy. Perhaps, it’d have avoided many things. Perhaps, she could be cautious of what she gets attached to in the future. Perhaps, it would’ve never created this story.”
― Misba, The High Auction

“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

“It was a cool, cloudless night with all but the brightest stars doused by a full moon, around which there hung a ring of umbral haze. Later, Helen heard such a ring was considered by some to be an omen of disaster.”
― Nicholas Evans, The Loop

“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

“It's a line from one of the characters in the novel. It means that everyone dies, and they're alone when they do.'
Lemon sneers. 'I'm not gonna die.'
'You'll die, and you'll die alone.'
'Even if I do die, I'll come back.'
'Yeah, it's like you to be so stubborn. But I'm going to die someday. Alone.”
― Kōtarō Isaka, Bullet Train

“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

“We collected our things from our quarters---the ones that had been assigned to us and the ones we had adopted--- and I gathered up all my notes that would slowly metamorphose into The Extinction of Irena Rey. Maybe Grey Eminence was right that writing has to be an engine of extinction. But the first to inhabit a traumatized landscape are often fungi, lichen, slime molds, and species of plants known as "ruderal," a word that derives from the Latin word for "rubble." Maybe the extinction of Irena Rey made the space for a ruderal art, like a book about what happened to her translators.”
― Jennifer Croft, The Extinction of Irena Rey

“One of the most pleasant recollections of those busy days was a Babylonian dinner given by Present Morton to the friends of the expedition. The cards at our plates were written in the language of Nebuchadnezzar; the bread was of the shape of Babylonian bricks; the great tray of ice-cream was the colour of the desert sand over which sweet icy camels bore burdens of other sweet ices; and there was a huge cake, like the Tower of Babel; about it wandered miniature Arabs with miniature picks, and concealed within its several stages was an art treasure for each of the guests. Then and there, as the Director of the Expedition, I opened the excavations, and from the ruins of the huge cake I rescued and distributed its buried treasures - antiquities fresh from Tiffany's. Finally the host proposed a toast to the expedition, but it happened by some chance that no glass was at my plate. Imagine my consternation when the guests were raising their glasses and were expressing wishes for my success, and I could not respond! Did it portend failure? Was it destined that success be denied me?”
― Harriet Crawford, Sumer and the Sumerians

“Life rolled over dead. Or so he thought.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Thus did Queen Rhaenyra replenish her coffers, at grievous cost. Neither Aegon nor his brother, Aemond, had ever been much loved by the people of the city, and many Kingslanders had welcomed the queen's return...but love and hate are two faces of the same coin, as fresh heads began appearing daily upon the spikes above the city gates, accompanied by ever more exacting taxes, the coin turned.”
― George R.R. Martin, Fire & Blood

“I’ve only heard my clients whispering about it every now and then. But there's a group that's formed right here in Rifthold and they want to put Aelin Galathynius back on Terrasen’s throne.” Her heart stopped beating, Aelin Galathynius, the lost heir of Terrasen. “Aelin Galathynius is dead,” she breathed.
Archer shook his head, “They don’t think so, they say she's alive and that she’s raising an army against the King. She’s looking to reestablish her court, to find what's left of King Orlons inner circle.” She just stared at him, willing her fingers to unclench, willing air into her lungs. If it were true - no, it wasn’t true. If these people actually claimed to have met the heir to the throne, then she had to be an impostor.”
― Sarah J. Maas, Crown of Midnight

“Tom Argent had once loved fairy tales. When he was very young, he had loved to read about princes, and kings, and queens, and fairies, and goblins, and magic. He even liked to pretend that he was the son of a fairy queen, or a pirate king, who had been adopted by humans, and one day would claim his kingdom.
His parents had grown concerned at this. They had never hidden the fact that Tom was adopted, and they knew that all children liked to pretend. But Tom's imagination was especially vivid. He loved his parents very much, but they were afraid that this daydreaming might lead him to reject them one day. And so, they had both gone out of their way to discourage his love of fairy tales.
Whenever they saw him with his books, they would tell him: 'Stories aren't real. Magic is just an illusion. Fairies don't exist, Tom. Only trust what you can see.'
Then, on his seventh birthday, they had given Tom a camera, and the books of fairy tales had vanished swiftly and silently overnight, to be replaced by magazines devoted to different types of lens, in which the young Tom Argent had found another kind of magic. But looking at these images of the mysterious girl, he felt as if he had returned to the world of those long-ago storybooks, and it felt both exciting and wonderful, and deeply, darkly dangerous.”
― Joanne Harris, The Moonlight Market

“With his panic came the slow, spreading realisation that he didn't need her. He was so used to dependency that it had taken a good long while for it to skin in, but--ding, lightbulb--she wasn't carrying him, and with this versatile new body under his control there was nothing she could do that he couldn't do himself. He had the hang of it now--he'd just proved it, he'd come all the way up this tunnel and he hadn't even fallen once. He could even run.”
― Waffles, Blue Sky