Quotes & Sayings About Ominous

And the sense of security, even the most warranted, is a bad councillor. It is the sense which, like that exaggerated feeling of well-being ominous of the coming on of madness, precedes the swift fall of disaster. — Joseph Conrad

Rain fell on the roofs of the just and the unjust, the saints and the sinners, those who knew peace and those in torment, and tomorrow began at a dark hour. — Robert McCammon

The ordeals at the airport, she said, had made her feel helpless and pathetic and lost. The strange way they spoke. Her diminishing supply of money. The cab rides through the mountains. The rain and heat. And the edge, the dark edge, the inwrought mood or tone, the ominous logic of the place. It was all dreamlike, a nightmare of isolation and constraint. She had to get off the island. — Anonymous

Torak's dead."
"Really?" Aunt Pol said. "Have you seen his grave? Have you opened the grave and seen his bones? — David Eddings

I know not, but strained silence, so I deem,
IS no less ominous than excessive grief. — Sophocles

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

When 1:45 came, half the class left, and Danny Hupfer whispered, "If she gives you a cream puff after we leave, I'm going to kill you" - which was not something that someone headed off to prepare for his bar mitzvah should be thinking.
When 1:55 came and the other half of the class left, Meryl Lee whispered, "If she gives you one after we leave, I'm going to do Number 408 to you." I didn't remember what Number 408 was, but it was probably pretty close to what Danny Hupfer had promised.
Even Mai Thi looked at me with narrowed eyes and said, "I know your home." Which sounded pretty ominous. — Gary D. Schmidt

Every nation feels itself to be superior, but in America it's a jaunty feeling, and in some cases a rather ominous one among the super-patriots. — James Salter

Reality's just the accumulation of ominous prophecies come to life. All you have to do is open a newspaper on any given day to weigh the good news versus the bad news, and you'll see what I mean. — Haruki Murakami

Americans have discovered the fragility of life, that ominous fragility that the rest of the world either already experienced or is experiencing now with terrible intensity. — Jose Saramago

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

Mainstream politicians will continue to protect existing systems of power, corporate executives will continue to maximize profit without concern, and the majority of people will continue to avoid these questions. It's the job of people with critical sensibilities - those who consistently speak out for justice and sustainability, even when it's difficult - not to back away just because the world has grown more ominous. — Robert Jensen

There was a Sabbath lull in the air, which, in a settlement unused to Sabbath influences, looked ominous. — Bret Harte

They're waiting for you. Go on in." Adrian leaned close to Keith's ear and spoke in an ominous voice. "If.You.Dare." He poked Keith's shoulder and gave a "Muhahaha" kind of monster laugh. — Richelle Mead

For those who fear to die, death walks behind them like an ominous shadow. But for those who embrace it, death casts a gentle eye upon that person. — Charles Lee

The word 'novel' carries, for me, a weight as ominous, all-consuming and unforgiving as any Job encountered. — Philip Schultz

The time has come (ominous musical crescendo) for some missions! — Andy Weir

People, he had said, were always being looked at as points, and they ought to be looked at as lines. There weren't any points, it was false to assume that a person ever was anything. He was always becoming something, always changing, always continuous and moving, like the wiggly line on a machine used to measure earthquake shocks. He was always what he was in the beginning, but never quite exactly what he was; he moved along a line dictated by his heritage and his environment, but he was subject to every sort of variation within the narrow limits of his capabilities.
...
She shut her mind on that too. There was danger in looking at people as lines. The past spread backward and you saw things in perspective that you hadn't seen then, and that made the future ominous, more ominous than if you just looked at the point, at the moment. There might be truth in what Bruce said, but there was not much comfort. — Wallace Stegner

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

Standing amid the tan, excited post-Christmas crowd at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a funny sudden feeling that what he has come to meet, what's floating in unseen about to land, is not his son Nelson and daughter-in-law Pru and their two children but something more ominous and intimately his: his own death, shaped vaguely like an airplane. — John Updike

To me the question of the environment is more ominous than that of peace and war ... I'm more worried about global warming than I am of any major military conflict. — Hans Blix

He liked murder. Murder and long walks had been two of his favorite things when he was younger. — Derek Landy

He asked her, 'Why do you feel sorry for me, Old Woman?'
The Old Woman stood beside him and looked out the window at the Garden, so beautiful, flowering and everywhere illuminated by the rays of the setting sun, and said, 'I feel sorry for you, dear Youth, because I know where you are gazing and what you are waiting for. I feel sorry for you and your mother.'
Perhaps because of these words, or perhaps because of something else, there was a change in the Youth's mood. The Garden, flowering behind the high fence below his window, and exuding a wonderful fragrance, suddenly seemed somehow strange to him; and an ominous sensation, a sudden fear, gripped his heart with a violent palpitation, like heady and languid fragrances rising from brilliant flowers.
'What is happening?' he wondered in confusion.
("The Poison Garden") — Valery Bryusov

The human brain works by identifying patterns. It uses information from the past to understand what is happening in the present and to anticipate the future. This strategy works elegantly in most situations. But we inevitably see patterns where they don't exist. In other words, we are slow to recognize exceptions. There is also the peer-pressure factor. All of us have been in situations that looked ominous, and they almost always turn out to be innocuous. If we behave otherwise, we risk social embarrassment by overreacting. So we err on the side of underreacting. — Amanda Ripley

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

By a curious coincidence, as each point was recalled, the black wizards of Ashantee would strike up with their hatchets, as in ominous comment on the white stranger's thoughts. Pressed by such enigmas and portents, it would have been almost against nature, had not, even into the least distrustful heart, some ugly misgivings obtruded. — Herman Melville

When the world stilled again, ominous silence reigned. Scratch that, not silence exactly. The van's radiator hissed, and someone was groaning. Oh, right. That was me. — Jaye Wells

For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned — George Santayana

Something deathless and dangerous in the world sweeps past you ... It is something fearful and ominous, something turbulent and to be dreaded, which distends the drama to include the life of nations as well as of men. It is an ageless warning ... — John Mason Brown

At one edge of the base, pressed between the fenceline and the sea, shimmered the pale archways and columns, the madrone and wind-shaped cypresses of the clifftop campus of College of the Surf. Against the somber military blankness at its back, here was a lively beachhead of drugs, sex, and rock and roll, the strains of subversive music day and night, accompanied by tambourines and harmonicas, reaching like fog through the fence, up the dry gulches and past the sentinel antennas, the white dishes and masts, the steel equipment sheds, finding the ears of sentries attentuated but ominous, like hostile-native sounds in a movie about white men fighting savage tribes. — Thomas Pynchon

I read somewhere that a man should tell the story of his life at the age of forty, and this deadline is fast approaching as I write these lines, only a few short weeks remain before this ominous birthday arrives. — Juan Gabriel Vasquez

An eerie atmosphere leeched from the soot-damaged walls. It was as if the house had died, and yet she felt she belonged here. It was as if the old place wanted to claim her from the grave. — Sara Sheridan

Twas ostensibly ominous in the overview
To be 'orribly and onerously overrun. — Ian McEwan

Animals like crows, owls or black cats are not ominous at all; it is the men's superstitious mind which is the inauspicious one! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

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

It is not enough to say the crow flies purposefully, or heavily, or rowingly, or whatever. There are no words to capture the infinite depth of crowiness in the crow's flight. All we can do is use a word as an indicator, or a whole bunch of words as a general directive. But the ominous thing in the crow's flight, the bare-faced, bandit thing, the tattered beggarly gipsy thing, the caressing and shaping yet slightly clumsy gesture of the down-stroke, as if the wings were both too heavy and too powerful, and the headlong sort of merriment, the macabre pantomime ghoulishness and the undertaker sleekness - you could go on for a very long time with phrases of that sort and still have completely missed your instant, glimpse knowledge of the world of the crow's wingbeat. And a bookload of such descriptions is immediately rubbish when you look up and see the crow flying. — Ted Hughes

If a White Court vampire wants to feed off a human, all she really has to do is crook her finger, and he comes running. There isn't any ominous music. Nobody sparkles. As far as anyone looking on is concerned, a girl winks at a boy and goes off somewhere to make out. Happens every day. They don't get — Jim Butcher

"Foreboding" and "ominous" is what you're striving to achieve-not mention. — Josip Novakovich

I talked to Zrakovi this afternoon," Alex said, giving me an undecipherable look. "He's putting me back on sentinel duty for the next few weeks while you handle a special assignment."
Special assignment had an ominous ring to it.
"What kind of special assignment? And why am I hearing it from you instead of Zrakovi?" Elder Z was my boss, not Alex, however Mr. Bossy liked to think otherwise.
"You're going to be babysitting Jean Lafitte and making sure he doesn't try to take revenge on anyone for what happened last month."
At my horrified, speechless gape, Alex gave me a grim smile and held his glass of port up in salute as my dessert congealed into a lump in my stomach. "Good luck with that, Jolie. — Suzanne Johnson

Cecily turned toward the ominous snuffling noise. There, in the underbrush, lurked a boar.
She'd never seen a boar, but she knew this must be one - else it was the largest, hairiest, most foul-smelling and predatory pig she'd ever encountered.
"Denny?" she called. Then, louder: "Portia? Mr. Brooke?"
The malodorous thing shuffled closer. It was drooling. Slobbering and snorting.
The beast's rubbery lips quivered and curled, revealing a pair of sharp, menacing tusks to complement the smaller, hooked set bracketing his snout.
"Go away," she told it. "Shoo."
No response. — Tessa Dare

The dark and the snow are too thick for him to see beyond the first trees. He's been in there before at this time, when the dark shuts down in early winter. But now he pays attention, he notices something about the bush that he thinks he has missed those other times. How tangled up in itself it is, how dense and secret. It's not a matter of one tree after another, it's all the trees together, aiding and abetting one another and weaving into one thing. A transformation, behind your back.
There's another name for the bush, and this name is stalking around in his mind, in and out of where he can almost grasp it. But not quite. It's a tall word that seems ominous but indifferent. — Alice Munro

A phrase (it often happened when he was exhausted) kept cycling round and round, preconsicously, just under the threshold of lip and tongue movement: "Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic." It repeated itself automatically and Stencil improved upon on it each time, placing emphasis on different words - "events seem"; "seem to be ordered"; "ominous logic" - pronouncing them differently, changing the "tone of voice" from sepulchral to jaunty: round and round and round. Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic. — Thomas Pynchon

When I was a deacon, the ominous signs of the Great Depression began to appear. Tens of thousands lost their jobs. Money was scarce. Families had to do without. Some young people did not ask their mothers, 'What's for dinner?' because they knew all too well that their cupboards held very little. — Joseph B. Wirthlin

Who are you?"
"I am Death," said the creature. "I thought that was obvious."
"But you're so small!"
"Only because you are small. You are young and far from your Death, September, so I seem as anything would seem if you saw it from a long way off-very small, very harmless. But I am always closer than I appear. As you grow, I shall grow with you, until at the end, I shall loom huge and dark over your bed, and you will shut your eyes so as not to see me. — Catherynne M Valente

Downfall? How ominous you make it sound. There is no downfall being plotted. Merely a question being asked. (Callie)
Aye, and empires have been splintered apart over the mere utterance of a single word. (Sin) — Kinley MacGregor

Rosa is pushing all the buttons. — Justine Larbalestier

It becomes clear that chronometric time is a homogeneous succession lacking all particularity. It is always the same, always indifferent to pleasure or pain. Mythological time, on the other hand, is impregnated with all the particulars of our lives: it is as long as eternity or as short as a breath, ominous or propitious, fecund or sterile. — Octavio Paz

It seemed a tragedy to want nothing - and yet he wanted something, something. He knew in flashes what it was - some path of hope to lead him toward what he thought was an imminent and ominous old age. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Never has good weather felt so bad. Never have flowers inspired so much fear. Never has the warm caress of a sunbeam seemed so ominous. The weather is sublime, it's glorious, it's the end of the world. — Joel Achenbach

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

Dreamworlds can maintain themselves only as glimpses. Once the writer transports the reader across the threshold, nothing that was promised can be delivered. What was ominous becomes ordinary; what was bizarre, quotidian. Unless you simply keep upping the ante, piling on the bullshit, the only way to revive things is to switch perspectives as quickly as you can. — M. John Harrison

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

Pauline, she could almost imagine it to say. Pauline, Pauline, Pauline.
That couldn't be right. It had to be saying something else.
Probably, You fool, you fool, you fool.
Somewhere nearby, love was an ominous, gaping hole in the earth, widening every moment. Unless she were very careful, she'd be sure to fall straight in.. — Tessa Dare

Just keep playing, mastering as you do the step Into disorder this one meant. Don't you see It's all we can do? Meanwhile, great fires Arise, as of haystacks aflame. The dial has been set And that's ominous, but all your graciousness in living Conspires with it, now that this is our home: A place to be from, and have people ask about. — John Ashbery

But he still lingered for a moment, as if waiting for the wind to take a hand and perhaps gust him down to his car. — Stephen King

Having completed its conquest of California in 1844, the United States looked across the Pacific for new business opportunities. In 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Tokyo (then called Edo) Bay with four men-of-war, and handed over a letter for the Japanese emperor from the American president which began with the ominous words, 'You know that the United States of America now extend from sea to sea.' Denied an audience with the emperor, Perry retreated with subtle threats to return with more firepower if the Japanese did not agree to open their ports to American trade. They refused. He did as he said; and the Japanese succumbed. — Pankaj Mishra

I think that its out very differences that make us a perfect match," he said, and his jaw moved under his fingertips. "You'd die of boredom with Thomas within a year. If I found a lady with a temper similar to mine, we'd tear each other apart within months. You and I, though, we're like bread and butter."
She snorted. "That's romantic."
"Hush," he said, his voice quivering with laughter, but also with an undertone of gravity. She cradled his jaw as he said, "Bread and butter. The bread provides stability for the butter; the butter gives taste to the bread. Together they're perfect."
Her eye brows drew together. "I'm the bread, aren't I?"
"Sometimes." His voice was a thread of rumbled sound, low and ominous. She could feel his words as they drifted over her palm. "And sometimes I'm the bread and you're the butter. But we go together
you understand that, don't you? — Elizabeth Hoyt

If I sound as if I'm always predicting ominous things, it's because I'm a pragmatist. I use deductive reasoning to generalize, and I suppose this sometimes ends up sounding like unlucky prophecies. You know why? Because reality's just the accumulation of ominous prophecies come to life. You have to only open a newspaper on any given day and weigh the good news versus the bad, and you'll see what I mean. — Haruki Murakami

Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of light not far from the docks, and heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking up, saw a swinging sign over the door with a white painting upon it, faintly representing a tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words underneath - "The Spouter Inn: - Peter Coffin." Coffin? - Spouter? - Rather ominous in that particular connexion, thought I. But it is a common name in Nantucket, they say, and I suppose this Peter here is an emigrant from there. As the light looked so dim, and the place, for the time, looked quiet enough, and the dilapidated little wooden house itself looked as if it might have been carted here from the ruins of some burnt district, and as the swinging sign had a poverty-stricken sort of creak to it, I thought that here was the very spot for cheap lodgings, and the best of pea coffee. — Herman Melville

Words that defy reality are ominous. And it's ominous reality that confronts those who would obscure the wise and worthy. — Mencius

If men are obsolete, then women will soon be extinct
unless we rush down that ominous Brave New World path where women clone themselves by parthenogenesis, as famously do Komodo dragons, hammerhead sharks, and pit vipers. — Camille Paglia

Because life is a symphony it must have its C Minor. Days there be when we hear only a discord of sharps and flats, and we wonder whether harmony will ever be restored. On other days we hear only an ominous, deep strain which seems to say that hope is fled. But why this chill despair? Symphonies are a blending of many tones, high and low, over and under, major and minor. One day cannot make a life a whole any more than shadows can make a picture or minor notes a symphony. We need to hear life's song, not as the discord of a single day, but as the completed harmony of all the years. Then will today's sorrow and tomorrow's disappointment ring forth in major key as glorious melody. — W. Waldemar W. Argow

Is there a spot on earth where such a man is unknown, an ominous survival testifying to the eternal fitness of lies and impudence? — Joseph Conrad

I've noticed most people are at their best during the day, in the light. Night fascinates you with its mystery and potential, but it's ominous too because things are easily hidden or lost in the dark, especially control. Most species I've encountered are powerless there. No matter where that dark is - inside or out - you are all at its mercy. It's harder to lose things and easier to find them, including yourself, in the light. — Jonathan Carroll

(It's a weird thing, depression. Even now, writing this with a good distance of fourteen years from my lowest point, I haven't fully escaped. You get over it, but at the same time you never get over it. It comes back in flashes, when you are tired or anxious or have been eating the wrong stuff, and catches you off guard. I woke up with it a few days ago, in fact. I felt its dark wisps around my head, that ominous life-is-fear feeling. But then, after a morning with the best five- and six-year-olds in the world, it subsided. it is now an aside. Something to put brackets around. Life lesson: the way out is never through yourself.) — Matt Haig

You can't afford to make the shark look good so you do most of it with ominous music and a fin. — Jim Howick

Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society ... To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil. — Gore Vidal

The Tower trembles; the worlds shudder in their courses. The rose feels a chill, as of winter. — Stephen King

Pakistan's ruler Pervez Musharraf predicted the Taliban will fall for hiding Osama bin Laden. Ex-king Zahir Shah is standing by to replace Mullah Mohammed Omar. And the most ominous sign of all, President Bush has learned all their names. — Argus Hamilton

And it may be that history, as Michel Foucault tried to convince us, is a list of discrete, disconnected processes whose joint impact is not linked to any one of them but to their fusion into one big explosion. In that case, history is not just a linear movement of endless American support for Israel against, and at the expense of, the Palestinian cause but a more distorted, curved line of ups and downs that indicate possible changes in the future. Moreover, a concerted effort to bring about such a change is a worthy goal - inside and outside the United States. But what we have this year is the ominous call at the 2006 AIPAC convention for the United States to attack and invade Iran.38 — Noam Chomsky

I was terrified of the Vietnam War when I was 13. I thought I was going. The draft was such an ominous thing, I felt as if it was going to trickle down to me. — Dylan McDermott

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

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

Never be intimidated by what seems ominous, for BiG is only an accumulation of many smalls. — Richelle E. Goodrich

You know what just seeing him did to me." "I know. Lois, he just isn't that ominous. Evil, but not ominous. Sly, but not prescient. Once he is off balance, he will stay off balance, and fall heavily. And the law will gather him in. — John D. MacDonald

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

All the color had been leached from Winterfell until only grey and white remained. The Stark colors. Theon did not know whether he ought to find that ominous or reassuring. Even the sky was grey. The eyes of the bride were brown. Big and brown and full of fear. — George R R Martin

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that has nothing to do with you, This storm is you. Something inside you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up the sky like pulverized bones. — Haruki Murakami

Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel-dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The villagers marked the time in two ways: before the swamp and after. What came before was good. And all that came after was not. — Melanie Crowder

To the being of fully alive, the future is not ominous but a promise; it surrounds the present like a halo. — John Dewey

The human eye has to be one of the cruelest tricks nature ever pulled. We can see a tiny, cone-shaped area of light right in front of our faces, restricted to a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. We can't see around walls, we can't see heat or cold, we can't see electricity or radio signals, we can't see at a distance. It is a sense so limited that we might as well not have it, yet we have evolved to depend so heavily on it as a species that all other perception has atrophied. We have wound up with the utterly mad and often fatal delusion that if we can't see something, it doesn't exist. Virtually all of civilization's failures can be traced back to that one ominous sentence: 'I'll believe it when I see it.' We can't even convince the public that global warming is dangerous. Why? Because carbon dioxide happens to be invisible. — David Wong

Paine knew that class tensions existed. He understood that revolutions stirred up resentments. In Common Sense, he adopted an ominous tone at a key point in his argument, warning readers that the time was ripe to declare independence and form a stable government. Or else. In the current state of things, "the mind of the multitude is left at random," he wrote, and "the property of no man is secure." Therefore, if the leadership class did not seize hold of the narrative, the broad appeal to political independence would be supplanted by an incendiary call for social leveling. — Nancy Isenberg

I have beheld the power of God manifest in my home and in my ministry. I have seen evil rebuked and the elements controlled. I know what it means to have mountains of difficulty and ominous Red Seas part. I know what it means to have the destroying angel "pass by them." To have received the authority and to have exercised the power of "the Holy Priesthood, after the Order of the Son of God," is as great a blessing for me and for my family as I could ever hope for in this world. And that, in the end, is the meaning of the priesthood in everyday terms
its unequaled, unending, constant capacity to bless. — Jeffrey R. Holland

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

Raoden turned to regard the large Dula. "What does it matter? It's not like we
have anything pressing to do. It's actually quite pleasant up here - you should
just sit back and enjoy it."
An ominous crash came from the clouds above them, and Raoden felt a wet drop
splat against his head.
"Fantastic," Galladon grumbled. "I'm enjoying myself already. — Brandon Sanderson

Thomas Jefferson had rather serious concerns about the fate of the democratic experiment.28 He feared the rise of a new form of absolutism that was more ominous than the British rule overthrown in the American Revolution. He distinguished in his later years between what he called "aristocrats and democrats."29 And then he went on to say, "I hope we shall ... crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial and bid defiance to the laws of our country."30 He also wrote, "I sincerely believe ... that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies."31 That's the kind of quote from a Founding Father you don't see too much. — Noam Chomsky

Each of us has the right and the responsibility to assess the roads which lie ahead, and those over which we have traveled, and if the future road looms ominous or unpromising, and the roads back uninviting, then we need to gather our resolve and, carrying only the necessary baggage, step off that road into another direction. If the new choice is also unpalatable, without embarrassment, we must be ready to change that as well. — Maya Angelou

Weird noises: Happen in the wee hours.

Me, unaffected: The only supernatural and ominous force in this place is me and I was here first, so whatever and whoever you are you need to go. — Unknown

And see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky ... — Martin Luther King Jr.

There was some kind of scuffle two hundred yards down the street, again strangely noiseless, and a huddled knot of men opened up to reveal two brawlers being separated and pulled away from their fight. What I saw next gave me a fright: in the farther distance, beyond the listless crowd, the body of a lynched man dangling from a tree. The body was slender, dressed from head to toe in black, reflecting no light. It soon resolved itself, however, into a less ominous thing: dark canvas sheeting on a construction scaffold, twirling in the wind. — Teju Cole

I had almost slid back into a more alert version of the contented state I'd been in when I woke up, when Rita jolted me out of my reverie. "Finish up, everybody," she said happily. "We have an awful lot to do today." It seemed like an ominous pronouncement. A lot to do? Like what? I tried to recall whether I had seen a lengthy list of tasks to perform - tasks so urgent that they could invade and conquer a Saturday I had hoped to dedicate to loafing. Nothing came to mind, and no list appeared. Rita was clearly so focused on whatever the jobs might be that she assumed we could all get our instructions from her telepathically. Perhaps my psychic antenna had blown down, but I had no idea at all what I was supposed to prepare for, and it seemed a little bit churlish to ask. — Jeff Lindsay

ominous and disquieting. It seemed that the evil power in Mirkwood had — J.R.R. Tolkien

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

We the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency-a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential ... the earth has a fever. And the fever is rising ... Indeed, without realizing it, we have begun to wage war on earth itself ... — Al Gore

I remember one woman making paper flowers to sell, with different herbs ... She made them so fast, and so many ... that as I watched, her first few zinnias became quickly enough a few hundred, and grew in their happiness to the size of sunflowers. The sunflowers themselves grew to the size of pumpkins, the snapdragons grew ominous, and the rosemary fragrant. — Alberto Alvaro Rios

[Henry James] privately characterized Roosevelt as "a dangerous and ominous jingo," and "the mere monstrous embodiment of unprecedented and resounding Noise. — Edmund Morris

Great griefs exhaust. They discourage us with life. The man into whom they enter feels something taken from him. In youth, their visit is sad; later on, it is ominous. — Victor Hugo

If not consciously acknowledged and mourned, uncertainty about one's descent can cause great anxiety and unrest, all the more so if, as in Alois's case, it is linked with an ominous rumor that can neither be proven nor completely refuted — Alice Miller

The most ominous of fallacies - the belief that things can be kept static by inaction — Freya Stark