Portend Quotes

Ye country comets, that portend No war, nor prince's funeral, Shining unto no higher end Than to presage the grasses fall ... ~ Andrew Marvell

It is said in those districts that not all the trains which run on the city's tracks are listed in Metropolitan Transit's compendious schedule. The residents will tell you that after midnight, on some nights, there will be other trains, trains whose cry is different, the bellow of some great beast fighting for its life. And if you watch those trains go past, behind those bright flickering windows you will see passengers unlike any passengers you have seen when riding the trains yourself: men with wings, women with horns, beast-headed children, fauns and dryads and green-skinned people more beautiful than words can describe. In 1893, a schoolteacher swore that she saw a unicorn; in 1934, a murderer turned himself into the police, weeping, saying that he saw his victims staring at him from a train as it howled past the station platform on which he stood.
These are the seraphic trains. The stories say they run to Heaven, Hell, and Faërie. They are omens, but no one can agree on what they portend. And although you will never meet anyone who has seen or experienced it, there are persistent rumors, unkillable rumors, that sometimes, maybe once a century, maybe twice, a seraphic train will stop in its baying progress and open its doors for a mortal.
Those who know the story of Thomas the Rhymer - and even some who don't - insist that all these people, blest or damned as they may be, must be poets. ~ Sarah Monette

Maybe he, like Mum, believed God had delivered three extra children, one-two-three, as a sign of His plan for this couple's long, long friendship. But God had also delivered to him the Oxford Paper Company, and the foamy river it sat upon. And the long working hours it required. And the poison it put in the air. Three more girls from God might portend a long married life, but a multi-acre paper mill, with much heat but no heart, could make for still competition if it decided to bestow the opposite.
Maybe it was the work. ~ Monica Wood

In a shadowy place something white flew up. It was a heron, and it went away over the dark treetops. William Wallace followed it with his eyes and Brucie clapped his hands, but Virgil gave a sigh, as if he knew that when you go looking for what is lost, everything is a sign.
("The Wide Net") ~ Eudora Welty

Today, America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. These events, tragic as they are, portend neither the end of the world nor of America's leadership in the world. ~ Gerald R. Ford

These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend
no good to us: though the wisdom of nature can
reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself
scourged by the sequent effects: love cools,
friendship falls off, brothers divide: in
cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in
palaces, treason; and the bond cracked 'twixt son
and father. This villain of mine comes under the
prediction; there's son against father: the king
falls from bias of nature; there's father against
child. We have seen the best of our time:
machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all
ruinous disorders, follow us disquietly to our
graves. Find out this villain, Edmund; it shall
lose thee nothing; do it carefully. And the
noble and true-hearted Kent banished! his
offence, honesty! 'Tis strange. ~ William Shakespeare

Without beauty a girl is unhappy because she has missed her chance to be loved. People do not jeer at her, they are not cruel to her, but it is as if she were invisible, no eyes follow her as she walks. People feel uncomfortable when they are with her. They find it easier to ignore her. A girl who is exceptionally beautiful, on the other hand, who has something which too far surpasses the customary seductive freshness of adolescence, appears somehow unreal. Great beauty seems invariably to portend some tragic fate. ~ Michel Houellebecq

Continuous scans of the brain to measure changes in blood flow) could control a robot hundreds of miles away just by imagining moving different parts of his body. The subject could see from the robot's perspective, thanks to a camera on its head, and when he thought about moving his arm or his legs, the robot would move correspondingly almost instantaneously. The possibilities of thought-controlled motion, not only for "surrogates" like separate robots but also for prosthetic limbs, are particularly exciting in what they portend for mobility-challenged or "locked in" individuals - spinal-cord-injury patients, amputees and others who cannot communicate or move in their current physical state. ~ Eric Schmidt

What did this portend? He still breathed, the instruments did not change, his heart beat on. But he called to Peter. Did this mean that he longed to live the life of his child of the mind, Young Peter? Or in some kind of delirium was he speaking to his brother the Hegemon? Or earlier, his brother as a boy. Peter, wait for me. Peter, did I do well? Peter, don't hurt me. Peter, I hate you. Peter for one smile of yours I'd die or kill. What was his message? ~ Orson Scott Card

It matters, because everything we say
Of the past is description without place, a cast
Of the imagination, made in sound;
And because what we say of the future must portend,
Be alive with its own seemings, seeming to be
Like rubies reddened by rubies reddening. ~ Wallace Stevens

From Orient Point

The art of living isn't hard to muster:
Enjoy the hour, not what it might portend.
When someone makes you promises, don't trust her

unless they're in the here and now, and just her
willing largesse free-handed to a friend.
The art of living isn't hard to muster:

groom the old dog, her coat gets back its luster;
take brisk walks so you're hungry at the end.
When someone makes you promises, don't trust her

to know she can afford what they will cost her
to keep until they're kept. Till then, pretend
the art of living isn't hard to muster.

Cooking, eating and drinking are a cluster
of pleasures. Next time, don't go round the bend
when someone makes you promises. Don't trust her

past where you'd trust yourself, and don't adjust her
words to mean more to you than she'd intend.
The art of living isn't hard to muster.

You never had her, so you haven't lost her
like spare house keys. Whatever she opens,
when someone makes you promises, don't. Trust your
art; go on living: that's not hard to muster. ~ Marilyn Hacker

Life has, indeed, many ills, but the mind that views every object in its most cheering aspect, and every doubtful dispensation as replete with latent good, bears within itself a powerful and perpetual antidote. The gloomy soul aggravates misfortune, while a cheerful smile often dispels those mists that portend a storm. ~ Lydia Sigourney

To be sure, faster growth in nominal labor compensation does not necessarily portend higher inflation. ~ Ben Bernanke

There was a mild, damp wind blowing. It was weather I was quite familiar with; and a sudden feeling and presentiment ran through me: that New Year's Day was not a day that differed from any other, not the first day of a new life when I could remake the acquaintance of Gilberte with the die still uncast, as though on the very first day of Creation when no past yet existed, as though the sorrows she had sometimes caused me had been wiped out, and with them all the future ones they might portend, as though I lived in a new world in which nothing remained of the old except one thing: my wish that Gilberte would love me. I realized that, since my heart yearned in this way for the redesign of a universe which had not satisfied it, this meant that my heart had not changed; and I could see there was no reason why Gilberte's should have changed either. I sensed that, though it was a new friendship for me, it would not be a new friendship for her, just as no years are ever separated from each other by a frontier, and that though[…]"it was a new friendship for me, it would not be a new friendship for her, just as no years are ever separated from each other by a frontier, and that though we may put different names to them, they remain beyond the reach of our yearnings, unaware of these and unaffected by them. Though I might dedicate this year to Gilberte, though I might try to imprint upon New Year's Day the special notion I had made up for it, as a religion is superimposed on the blind ~ Marcel Proust

Some dire misfortune to portend, no enemy can match a friend. ~ Jonathan Swift

But over the past fifty years, accomplishment in our poetry has been signaled most often by manner - as if it were the job of artists not to engage the most potent aspects of Dickinson or Eliot but to sequester themselves in one or another schoolroom, buoyed by the camaraderie with other students sitting obediently, if stylishly, in rows. Schoolroom for formalists, schoolroom for experimentalists - the degeneration of these terms, hijacked by the renegade engines of taste, would portend the degeneration of the medium, except that while fifty years is a long time in the life of an artist, it is in the history of art nothing, the blink of an eye. ~ James Longenbach

A lofty birth or a large fortune portend merit, and cause it to be the sooner noticed. ~ Jean De La Bruyere

You've tugged on your bonnet strings five times in this conversation already. Why wear one, if it's so uncomfortable? Have you any reason for it, other than that it is what everyone else does?"
"I brown terribly in the sunlight. I'll develop freckles."
"Oh no,. That sounds awful." He spoke with exaggerated solicitude, but he leaned down from his horse until his nose was a bare foot from hers. "Freckles. And what do those dastardly spots portend? Are freckled people thrown in prison? Pilloried? Covered in tar and sprinkled with tiny little down feathers? ~ Courtney Milan

So long as globalization was slow in coming, everyone hoped and prayed that it would come soon. The unity of the world's nations was one of the great triumphalist themes of modernism. World's fairs were staged in its honor, one after another. Now that globalization is here, however, it arouses more anxiety than pride. The erasing of differences may not portend the era of universal reconciliation that everyone confidently expected. ~ Rene Girard