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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Careful! Ms. Pac-Man only gets to stay on this side as long as Pac-Man survives on his. True love, right? If I don't find the portal before you die," Maura warned him, "I vanish. Literally. We'll have to reset the game to get her to show up again."
"Happy Meal, huh? To bring a ghost back from the Dead?" Kostya maneuvered Pac-Man around a corner. "That's kind of on the nose."
"Well, Hungry Ghosts are the kind that come back." Maura grinned. "Feeding the Dead to help them cross--- it's a whole thing in, like, a dozen different traditions. Japan. China. Mexico. Ancient Egypt. I figured it'd be up your alley.”
― Daria Lavelle, Aftertaste

“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

“It began with a whisper and it will end with a scream. What comes between is a dance of
fate’s tangled threads.”
― Carissa Broadbent, Children of Fallen Gods

“Zaraz po wejściu Geralta rzucił się nań z widłami, rycząc wściekle. Geralt uchylił się bez trudu, śmiejąc się w duchu. Nierozumnym raczej, a wręcz szaleńczym pomysłem było atakować wiedźmina czymś tak ciężkim i mało poręcznym, jak widły.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, Rozdroże kruków

“It started, as many disasters do, with a long weekend in North Yorkshire.”
― Tom Cartledge, SaddleSore: From England to India

“Has anyone ever told you that you squint when you lie?"
His scowl only deepened. "No, but only because no one has spent as much time looking at me as you do, Winnow.”
― Rebecca Ross , Divine Rivals

“He was unlike most I had met before. He was wearing a wife-beater top with a fancy shirt pocket where he kept his pack of smokes.”
― Jeffrey Barber, Short Stories: Lovers, Friends & Loss