Quotes & Sayings About Foreshadowing

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

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

The only thing we know for certain is that Darquesse is coming, and she's coming to kill us all. — Derek Landy

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

He read the veinings of a leaf, the pattern on a mushroom cap, and divined mysteries, relations, futures, possibilities: the magic of symbols, the foreshadowing of numbers and writing, the reduction of infinitudes and multiplicities to simplicity, to system, to concept. For all these ways of comprehending the world through the mind no doubt lay within him, nameless, unnamed, but not inconceivable, not beyond the bounds of presentiment, still in the germ, but essential to his nature, part of him, growing organically within him. And if we were to go still further back beyond this Rainmaker and his time which to us seems so early and primitive, if we were to go several thousand years further back into the past, wherever we found man we would still find - this is our firm belief - the mind of man, that mind which has no beginning and always has contained everything that it later produces. — Hermann Hesse

What came next is very hard to tell. Indeed, I have told it but once before, when I needed to, and I will tell it this time only becaude it forms a strand in the fabric of my story, and it wove itself into what came after. — Juliet Marillier

I like Fall, tending to prefer the transitional seasons, because they don't have weather, just foreshadowing. It's not cold yet, but it's getting colder. You look hippest in this weather, dressed in your faux-proletariat thrift store jacket and long pants to hide your dorky knees. Fall seems pregnant with the possibility of simpler things, a straight-forward future. — Al Burian

There were hints and intimations of the shape of things to come. — Dexter Palmer

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? — Toni Morrison

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

Your lingering presence erodes me. Heartbeat by heartbeat. Cell by aging cell. Washing away any sense of self I ever had. Intruding into a nothingness I've struggled to find the pieces to fill. A jar filled with stones, piled with pebbles, topped with sand, only to be left with the knowledge that water, with enough time and persistence, has the power to wash it all away.
Your name is on my lips. Frozen. A familiar cadence of syllables that once soothed me.
A name I can't speak. Can't think of.
Not on this shore, at our lake. Not on this day. When only a year ago, with a foreshadowing that is now ice in my veins, you stood next to me, in this jacket, your hand in mine, so warm, and stared out at this expanse and whispered in awe, This is what a cold lake looks like. — S.A. McAuley

The worst moments in life are heralded by small observations. — Andy Weir

If there are words and wrongs like knives, whose deep inflicted lacerations never heal - cutting injuries and insults of serrated and poison-dripping edge - so, too, there are consolations of tone too fine for the ear not fondly and for ever to retain their echo: caressing kindnesses - loved, lingered over through a whole life, recalled with unfaded tenderness, and answering the call with undimmed shine, out of that raven cloud foreshadowing Death himself. — Charlotte Bronte

UR LOCAL's under construction. Better watch out, traffic fines double. — Stephen King

There was no escaping his crown. Or his father, who would behead Sorscha, burn her, and scatter her ashes to the wind if he found out she'd helped him. His father, whom his friends were now working to destroy. They had lied to him and ignored him for that cause. Because he was a danger, to them, to Sorscha, and - — Sarah J. Maas

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. — Lauren Owen

I have learned to look upon each little hindrance as a jest and each great one as a foreshadowing of victory. — L.M. Montgomery

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

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. — Seanan McGuire

You know what happens to me! — Satoshi Kon

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. — John Updike

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. — Cassandra Clare

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

I dream of chaos and serenity. Some might call what I dream a nightmare, a madness of the mind. Me, I think of it as a foreshadowing of what's to come in my future, of what I hope to achieve one day. — Jessica Sorensen

Forewarned is not forearmed, it is foreshadowed. — A.P.

Beware the ides of March. — William Shakespeare

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

There's no way for me to warn you about the terrible things that I know are going to happen. — Dexter Palmer

Michael looked around the beautiful garden with its many colored flowers, fragrant lemon trees, the old statures of the gods dug from ancient ruins, other newer ones of holy saints, the rose-colored walls across the villa. It was a lovely setting for the examination of twelve murderous apostles. — Mario Puzo

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. — Marie Brennan

Stop whimpering and snapping at me, I'm sick of it. Keep your mouth shut and do as I tell you, and maybe we'll even be in time for your uncle's bloody wedding. — George R R Martin

One-way love is rare, though, and it always comes as a surprise. Fortunately, the glimpses we receive in relationships are only a foreshadowing of God's love for us. They are like little arrows that point to the very heart of the universe, what Dante called 'the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars,' the love that received its fullest expression in the person and work of Jesus Christ. — Tullian Tchividjian

Because you don't live in a book. Nobody does, silly. Things never happen the way they would in a book. There isn't foreshadowing. — Laurel Snyder

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. — Johnny B. Truant

Well, think about it for a minute. A guy tells you that he loves you and then turns around and buys you flowers ... or worse, tells you that he loves you with flowers. Cut flowers die. They die in a few days after being cut ... and this is what you guys choose to use as proof of your love? Something that dies in a few days? To me it seems like foreshadowing or something, like your basically saying that our love is beautiful but only for a limited time and then it will wither away to nothing like your flowers. — Jennifer Snyder

Queer, how I misinterpreted the designations of doom. — Vladimir Nabokov

In books, sometimes the foreshadowing is so obvious that you know what's going to happen. But knowing what happens isn't the same as knowing how it happens. Getting there is the best part. — Emery Lord

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. — Lemony Snicket

I watched the first shoots
like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart
broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly
multiplying in the rows. I doubt
you have a heart, in our understanding of
that term. You who do not discriminate
between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence,
immune to foreshadowing ... — Louise Gluck

America, I don't think you can change history." All the same, his expression looked hopeful.
"Sure we can. Besides, who'd ever know about it but you and me? — Kiera Cass

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. — Natalia Marx

When she lay curled against him, her skin dewed from passion, there was still that small, cold place inside of her where the heat hadn't quite reached. — J.D. Robb

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

To look into the eyes of a cannibal. I turn away at the thought. — Carol Birch

I run into trees all the time when I go sledding — Geoffrey Rogers

I consider it as a foreshadowing of modernity in many different respects, and the consistency of character is interesting to the emerging modern psychology. The emphasis on dream knowledge relates quite deeply to psychoanalysis, although I suppose psychoanalysis wouldn't like to say that ... Freud was always saying he was a scientist. — Marina Warner

I remember tearing up the first time I read Nabokov's description, in 'Speak, Memory,' of his father being tossed on a blanket by cheering muzhiks, with its astonishingly subtle foreshadowing of grief and mourning. — Michael Chabon

For need can blossom into all the compensation it requires. 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. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries. — Marilynne Robinson

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. — Jane Austen

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

Foreshadowing: Was my challenging Allah to unleash the full weight of his fury upon us, with dark clouds looming in the distance. — Adam Fenner

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. — William Dalrymple

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

Leaves turned to soil beneath my feet. Thus it is, trees eat themselves. — David Mitchell

When I was old enough to know better, I ate a bar of soap in the shape of the Muppets' Fozzie Bear, because I loved him so much I wanted to consume him, even if doing so made me ill. I didn't yet know the word 'foreshadowing.' Fozzie was the only first of many pop-culture icons I feel shaped by. — Emma Forrest

There's things that have no finish, Scully, no ending to speak of. There's no justice to it, but that's the God's truth. The only end some things have is the end you give em. — Tim Winton

I won't be one of the hundreds telling you that being alive flows like a story you write consciously, deliberately, full of linear narrative, foreshadowing, repetition, motifs. The emotional beats come down where they should, last as long as they should, end where they should, and that should come from somewhere real and natural, not from the tyranny of the theatre, the utter hegemony of fiction. — Catherynne M Valente

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

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

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. — Vladimir Nabokov

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

Foreshadowing is the storytelling companion of fate. — John Irving

God is a novelist. He uses all sorts of literary devices: alliteration, assonance, rhyme, synecdoche, onomatopoeia. But of all of these, His favorite is foreshadowing. And that is what God was doing at the Cloisters and with Eudora Welty. He was foreshadowing. He was laying traps, leaving clues, clues I could have seen had I been perceptive enough. — Lauren F. Winner

Unintentional foreshadowing is unintentionally hilarious. — Sarah Wendell

The Resurrection is the supreme vindication of Jesus' divine identity and his inspired teaching. It's the proof of his triumph over sin and death. It's the foreshadowing of the resurrection of his followers. It's the basis of Christian hope. It's the miracle of all miracles. — Lee Strobel

Turning his back on the village of Unwin, Chiave lumbered into the forest, barely able to walk under the weight of all he carried. — Amanda Orneck

In life one rarely knows which remarks of the hundreds uttered in the course of a day will turn out to be auspicious. In fiction, foreshadowing is planted and flagged in some (hopefully or desperately) subtle way, drama demands it. — Delia Ephron

It is well to be attentive to successive ambitions that flood the growing boy's and girl's imagination. They leave profound traces behind them. During those years when the first sap is rising the future tree is foreshadowing its contour. We are shaped by the promises of imagination. — Thornton Wilder

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. — Lemony Snicket

The star only rises at Nightfall... — Shannon Messenger

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. — John Updike

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. — J.D. Robb

Whatever house I'm in, I hope she's not in it. — J.K. Rowling

The morning was one peculiar to that coast. Everything was mute and calm; everything gray. The sea, though undulated into long roods of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter's mould. The sky seemed a gray surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors among which they were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms. Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come. — Herman Melville