“He’s too superstitious not to see this as a bad omen, but when you're a pessimist, all omens are bad.”
Source: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Chapter 23
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Michael Chabon96
Novelist, short story writer, essayist 1963Related quotes
Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher
Source: The Doctrine of the Mean
“And how could he know whether it was a good omen or not without another drink?”
Malcolm Lowry book Under the Volcano
Source: Under the Volcano (1947), Ch. VII (*p. 201)
“All events became omens; I lost the ability to take anything literally.”
Douglas Coupland (1961) Canadian novelist, short story writer, playwright, and graphic designer
Generation X (1991)
“Boy, there's nothing worse than an inscrutable omen.”
Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist
“Fools can make an omen of anything in retrospect.”
Source: The Black Company (1984), Chapter 1, “Legate” (p. 11)
Hartley Coleridge (1796–1849) British poet, biographer, essayist, and teacher
Sylphs
Poems (1851), Prometheus
Context: He grew, and grew,
A star-bright sign of fated empery;
And all conspiring omens led him on
To lofty purpose and pre-eminence.
The mountain eagles, towering in their pride,
Stoop'd at his beck and flock'd about his path,
Like the small birds by wintry famine tamed;
Or with their dusky and expansive wings
Shaded and fann'd him as he slept at noon.
The lightnings danced before him sportively,
And shone innocuous as the pale cold moon
In the clear blue of his celestial eye.
“Bird-signs!
Fight for your country—that is the best, the only omen!”
XII. 243 (tr. Robert Fagles).
Iliad (c. 750 BC)