Foreboding Quotes

Oh, my sweet summer child," Old Nan said quietly, "what do you know of fear? Fear is for the winter, my little lord, when the snows fall a hundred feet deep and the ice wind comes howling out of the north. Fear is for the long night, when the sun hides its face for years at a time, and little children are born and live and die all in darkness while the direwolves grow gaunt and hungry, and the white walkers move through the woods

Do you know how sometimes - when you are riding your bike and you start skidding across sand, or when you miss a step and start tumbling down the stairs - you have those long, long seconds to know that you are going to be hurt, and badly?

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance

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.

The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love and the voice of art.

At this point, you may be wondering how I felt seeing my son with Nico di Angelo. I’ll admit I did not understand Will’s attraction to a child of Hades, but if the dark foreboding type was what made Will happy… Oh perhaps some of you are wondering how I felt seeing him with a boyfriend rather than a girlfriend. If that’s the case, please. We gods are not hung up about such things.

With a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.

The man who finds that in the course of his life he has done a lot of wrong often wakes up at night in terror, like a child with a nightmare, and his life is full of foreboding: but the man who is conscious of no wrongdoing is filled with cheerfulness and with the comfort of old age.

Like anybody, I would like to have a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will.

The worst moments in life are heralded by small observations.

Stir not the bitterness in the cup that I mixed for myself,' said Denethor. 'Have I not tasted it now many nights upon my tongue, foreboding that worse lay in the dregs?

Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.

I can’t help but ask, “Do you know where you are?” She turns to me with a foreboding glare. “Do you?

The old church tower and garden wall Are black with autumn rain And dreary winds foreboding call The darkness down again

Nico didn’t like to be touched, but somehow this brief contact with his father felt reassuring – the same way the Chapel of Bones was reassuring. Like death, his father’s presence was cold and often callous, but it was real – brutally honest, inescapably dependable.

The day we stop learning is the day we die.

The night stared me in the face, amorphous, blind, infinite, without frontiers. Not a single start relieved the darkness behind the glass.

Confidence is what we get when we take fear, face it and replace it.

The silence was worse than the gunshots. The wait worse than the confusion. The forebode worse than any danger.

I went to sleep with gum in my mouth and now there's gum in my hair and when I got out of bed this morning I tripped on the skateboard and by mistake I dropped my sweater in the sink while the water was running and I could tell it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

When we lose our tolerance for vulnerability, joy becomes foreboding.

For the first time his mind grasped the fact that when life has sentenced you to suffer, the sentence is neither a fancy nor a threat, but you are dragged to the rack, and you are tortured, and there is no marvelous rescue at the last moment, no awakening as from a bad dream. He felt it as a foreboding which struck him with terror.

Sometimes you can look at a wedding and realize with a certain sense of resignation that any children produced in that marriage will inevitably be fucked up and fucked over. It’s a fact, not a sense of foreboding so much as a grim acceptance that these two people should not—but definitely will—reproduce.

Indeed, at hearing the news that 'the old god is dead', we philosophers and 'free spirits' feel illuminated by a new dawn; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, forebodings, expectation - finally the horizon seems clear again, even if not bright; finally our ships may set out again, set out to face any danger; every daring of the lover of knowledge is allowed again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; maybe there has never been such an 'open sea'.

Everything she is dwells behind her eyes. She has her father’s mind. Her mother’s face. And a distant, foreboding sort of intelligence that can give you wings or crush you to the earth.

Why did the stars seem to be looking down at me with pity, making me feel ant-sized, overwhelmed, completely insignificant? It was too big, that close sky, too beautiful, and it filled me with a strange sense of foreboding.

Despite my pain, I felt not the regret of an ending, but the foreboding of a beginning.

But as he stood watching Carthage burn, Scipio reflected on the fate of this once great power. Overcome with emotion, he cried. His friend and mentor Polybius approached and asked why Scipio was crying. "A glorious moment, Polybiius; but I have a dread foreboding that some day the same doom will be pronounced on my own country." Scipio then quoted a line from Homer: "A day will come when sacred Troy shall perish, And Priam and his people shall be slain." Scipio knew that no power endures indefinitely, that all empires must fall.

You're Meg McCaffrey," he decided. "Yep." "Cool. I'm Leo. And, uh..." He pointed at me. "I understand you can, like, control this guy?" I cleared my throat. "We merely cooperate! I'm not controlled by anyone. Right, Meg?" "Slap yourself," Meg commanded. I slapped myself. Leo grinned. "Oh, this is too good. I'm going to check on Calypso, but later we need to talk." He slid down the ladder railings, leaving me with a deep sense of foreboding.

Foreboding, and an all too familiar lack of control, roiled in my gut. My opponent might be hungry for a win, but I was famished. Something in my life would be a victory. Sorry Shark, I wasn’t going down tonight. No chance. - Jason Ayers

I have a foreboding of America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time–when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all of the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; with our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. And when the dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites now down to 10 seconds or less, lowest-common-denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

There are too many people in the world today who decide to live disappointed rather than risk feeling disappointment. This can take the shape of numbing, foreboding joy, being cynical or critical, or just never really fully engaging.

To my surprise, I felt a certain springy keenness. I was ready to hike. I had waited months for this day, after all, even if it had been mostly with foreboding. I wanted to see what was out there. All over America today people would be dragging themselves to work, stuck in traffic jams, wreathed in exhaust smoke. I was going for a walk in the woods. I was more than ready for this.

Two ingredients most valuable in the concocting of a ghost story are the atmosphere and the nicely managed crescendo …Let us, then, be introduced to the actors in a placid way; let us see them going about their ordinary business, undisturbed by forebodings, pleased with their surroundings; and into this calm environment let the ominous thing put out its head, unobtrusively at first, and then more insistently, until it holds the stage.

Paoletta turned to him with a dark face. Chase had never seen her look so foreboding. “You’d better watch out, Chase. He’s passed over to the evil side.

Hard, hard it is, this anxious autumn To lift the heavy mind from its dark forebodings;

This book is called "Blue Nights" because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days,the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.

Weak people live in perpetual fear and foreboding.

The sun went down with practiced bravado. Twilight crawled across the sky, laden with foreboding. ---- Max Payne 1

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood.

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

They all laughed and clapped, taking it for a deliberate witticism, while he had no idea what he was saying, so great was his foreboding of misfortune and his feeling of powerlessness over the future, however great his thirst for goodness and his capacity for happiness.

Meadow's Waltz ...the meadow had become her sanctuary of spirit offering an escape from a pain no child should ever endure foreboding clouds began...

The problem is, it's just not enough to live according to the rules. Sure, you manage to live according to the rules. Sometimes it's tight, extremely tight, but on the whole you manage it. Your tax papers are up to date. Your bills paid on time. You never go out without your identity card (and the special little wallet for your Visa!). Yet you haven’t any friends. The rules are complex, multiform. There’s the shopping that needs doing out of working hours, the automatic dispensers where money has to be got (and where you so often have to wait). Above all there are the different payments you must make to the organizations that run different aspects of your life. You can fall ill into the bargain, which involves costs, and more formalities. Nevertheless, some free time remains. What’s to be done? How do you use your time? In dedicating yourself to helping people? But basically other people don’t interest you. Listening to records? That used to be a solution, but as the years go by you have to say that music moves you less and less. Taken in its widest sense, a spot of do-it-yourself can be a way out. But the fact is that nothing can halt the ever-increasing recurrence of those moments when your total isolation, the sensation of an all-consuming emptiness, the foreboding that your existence is nearing a painful and definitive end all combine to plunge you into a state of real suffering. And yet you haven’t always wanted to die. You have had a life. There have been moments when you were having a life. Of course you don't remember too much about it; but there are photographs to prove it. This was probably happening round about the time of your adolescence, or just after. How great your appetite for life was, then! Existence seemed so rich in new possibilities. You might become a pop singer, go off to Venezuela. More surprising still, you have had a childhood. Observe, now, a child of seven, playing with his little soldiers on the living room carpet. I want you to observe him closely. Since the divorce he no longer has a father. Only rarely does he see his mother, who occupies an important post in a cosmetics firm. And yet he plays with his little soldiers and the interest he takes in these representations of the world and of war seems very keen. He already lacks a bit of affection, that's for sure, but what an air he has of being interested in the world! You too, you took an interest in the world. That was long ago. I want you to cast your mind back to then. The domain of the rules was no longer enough for you; you were unable to live any longer in the domain of the rules; so you had to enter into the domain of the struggle. I ask you to go back to that precise moment. It was long ago, no? Cast your mind back: the water was cold.

If she’d been smart enough to say, Your money is tempting but wow are you strange; I am too but let me just add that something does not feel right here. Something feels aggressively odd on a next-level realm I had not previously imagined, in terms of foreboding discomfort.

Wei WuXian, "If I don't go, how am I supposed to leave? Are you gonna carry me on your back or something?" "..." Lan WangJi looked at him in silence. Wei WuXian's smile froze on his face, just as a foreboding feeling crossed his mind.

I steal one glance over my shoulder as soon as we are far from the foreboding luminance of the neon glow, and it is there that my stomach leaps into my throat. Squatting just shy of the light and partially concealed by the shade of an alley is a sinister silhouette beneath a crimson cowl, beaming a demonic smile which spans from cheek to swollen cheek.

I'm like my mother, she thought, I search my joy for signs of sorrow ahead.

To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus...

I recall how miserable I was, and how one day you brought me to a realization of my miserable state. I was preparing to deliver a eulogy upon the emperor in which I would tell plenty of lies with the object of winning favor with the well-informed by my lying; so my heart was panting with anxiety and seething with feverish, corruptive thoughts. As I passed through a certain district in Milan I noticed a poor beggar, drunk, as I believe, and making merry. I groaned and pointed out to the friends who were with me how many hardships our idiotic enterprises entailed. Goaded by greed, I was dragging my load of unhappiness along, and feeling it all the heavier for being dragged. Yet while all our efforts were directed solely to the attainment of unclouded joy, it appeared that this beggar had already beaten us to the goal, a goal which we would perhaps never reach ourselves. With the help of the few paltry coins he had collected by begging this man was enjoying the temporal happiness for which I strove by so bitter, devious and roundabout a contrivance. His joy was no true joy, to be sure, but what I was seeking in my ambition was a joy far more unreal; and he was undeniably happy while I was full of foreboding; he was carefree, I apprehensive. If anyone had questioned me as to whether I would rather be exhilarated or afraid, I would of course have replied, "Exhilarated"; but if the questioner had pressed me further, asking whether I preferred to be like the beggar, or to be as I was then, I would have chosen to be myself, laden with anxieties and fears. Surely that would have been no right choice, but a perverse one? I could not have preferred my condition to his on the grounds that I was better educated, because that fact was not for me a source of joy but only the means by which I sought to curry favor with human beings: I was not aiming to teach them but only to win their favor.

If the atmosphere is to be foreboding, you must forebode on every page. If it is to be cold, you must chill, not once or twice, but until your readers are shivering.

Rebuke Obstinate regression bringing untold paths of deep dark foreboding depression...

I steer my bark with Hope in the head, leaving Fear astern. My hopes, indeed, sometimes fail; but not oftener than the forebodings of the gloomy.

Love gives insight, Maggie, and insight often gives foreboding. Listen to me, let me supply you with books; do let me see you sometimes, be your brother and teacher, as you said at Lorton. It is less wrong that you should see me than that you should be committing this long suicide.

The pen moved slowly upon paper And tears fell. He had written a name, yours, in printed letters: One word on which bemusedly to pore - No protest, no desire, your naked name, Nothing more. - The Foreboding

All your sea-omens are of disaster; and of course, with man in his present unhappy state, huddled together in numbers far too great and spending all his surplus time and treasure beating out his brother's brains, any gloomy foreboding is likely to be fulfilled; but your corpse, your parson, your St Elmo's fire is not the cause of the tragedy.

And one day, very soon in fact, Adi would be an adolescent. An adolescent son of a clerk. A miserable thing to be in this country. He would have to forget all his dreams and tell himself that what he wanted to do was engineering. It's the only hope, everyone would tell him. Engineering, Adi would realize, is every mother's advice to her son, a father's irrevocable decision, a boy's first foreboding of life.

He knew that she had been dreaming that night and he knew what her dreams were about. She had forgotten them. He forebode to look at her. It gave him a grim, horrible, and rather uncanny sensation to think that a vivid, lacerating life could go on when one sunk in unconsciousness, a life so real that it could cause tears to stream down the face and twist the mouth in woe, and yet when the sleeper woke left no recollection behind.

Fear is the vigilance and the need to escape from something real. Anxiety is about dread and foreboding and your imagination running away with you. Much as with depression, anxiety is rooted in a cognitive distortion. In this case, people prone toward anxiety overestimate risks and the likelihood of a bad outcome.

Do you ride?” That sounded sort of dirty, and the way he looked at me felt sort of dirty, too. No one ever looked at me like that. “Why ‘Ghost’?” I asked. Grasping the top of the car door, he leaned over it and spoke in a dramatic, foreboding voice. “Because she’s so fast she disappears down the streets at night.” “That sounds dangerous.” His dimple appeared. “The best things in life are.

I could feel the urgency in the driver’s voice as he prodded the horses to greater momentum. The rumble of thunder could be heard rolling through the mountains as foreboding dark clouds rolled overhead obscuring the starry sky.  The sun vanished with one last glimmer through the pine trees, then night took possession of the earth. 

When your conscious mind (the Little Me) is full of fear, worry, and anxiety, the negative emotions engendered in your subconscious mind (the Big Me) are released and flood the conscious mind with a sense of panic, foreboding, and despair. When this happens, you can, like Caruso, speak affirmatively and with a deep sense of authority to the irrational emotions generated in your deeper mind as follows: "Be still, be quiet, I am in control, you must obey me, you are subject to my command, you cannot intrude where you do not belong.

I am quite glad you are at home; for these hurries and forebodings by which I have been surrounded all day long, have made me nervous without reason. You are not going out, I hope?' No; I am going to play backgammon with you, if you like,' said the Doctor. I don't think I do like, if I may speak my mind. I am not fit to be pitted against you to-night. Is the tea-board still there Lucie? I can't see.

The first frost comes to Beartown and Hed tonight. The universe becomes silent. It is stunning in a way that letters can never embrace. If you ask someone who has moved away from here what they miss the most about the forest, they will probably say just this: the foreboding of winter, the still sorrow of a past summer, the autumn that seems to be only a wink here. The birds become hesitant, the lake freezes. Soon we'll see our breaths in front of us and our footprints behind us.

How bad will it hurt?" I ask suddenly as Cain pulls the car onto the road to head back to my house. "How bad will what hurt?" "The spankings, the torture, all the ways you want to punish me." "I'm not a sadist, Evan. I don't get off on hurting women." "So it won't hurt?" "Oh, it will, but you'll love the way it hurts," he says, and as his words fall upon my ears in a harmony of exhilaration and foreboding, I think I'm beginning to understand.

People are ignorant of what any street clock knows. Why? Because the crack that cleaves existence also swallows their existence-reflecting consciousnesses. Thrown back into existence, the poor souls don't suspect that a moment ago they didn't exist - and only isolated things and persons, swallowed by the crack never to return to this world, arouse a certain fear and foreboding.

The frivolity and boredom which unsettle the established order, the vague foreboding of something unknown, these are the heralds of approaching change. The gradual crumbling that left unaltered the face of the whole is cut short by a sunburst which, in one flash, illuminates the features of the new world.

And yet he felt forebodings. Some nameless threat lurked just around the corner of the world for the sun to rise again. The feeling had been gnawing at him, as annoying as a swarm of hungry insects that buzzed about one's face in the desert sun. There was the sense of the imminent, the remorseless, the mindless; it coiled like a heat-maddened rattler, ready to strike at rolling tumbleweed.

Séraphine." The whisper in her dreams and Bridget whimpered and tried to bat it away. She needn't wake yet. It wasn't time to rise. She had hours still. A soft chuckle and the brush of something soft on her cheek. "I would never have guessed you were such a deep sleeper, my practical housekeeper." She had a terrible foreboding, an awful suspicion, even in her dreams, and she fought valiantly through the sluggish waves. Bridget opened her eyes, blinking, in the candlelight, to find azure eyes only inches from her own. They crinkled at the corners. "There you are.

Someone must have been in a rush to leave this morning," I told the door, trying to tamp down the major case of the willies the silent street was giving me. "Someone was just late for work, and they didn't quite close the door. That's all. There's nothing foreboding in a door that hasn't been shut all the way. There's nothing eerie in that at all. There's nothing creepy about the street...Oh, crap. Hello?

Nevertheless, some free time remains. What’s to be done? How do you use your time? In dedicating yourself to helping people? But basically other people don’t interest you. Listening to records? That used to be a solution, but as the years go by you have to say that music moves you less and less. Taken in its widest sense, a spot of do-it-yourself can be a way out. But the fact is that nothing can halt the ever-increasing recurrence of those moments when your total isolation, the sensation of an all-consuming emptiness, the foreboding that your existence is nearing a painful and definitive end all combine to plunge you into a state of real suffering.

The narrator, a time traveler from 2011, scoffs at the despondency caused by the Cuban Missile Crisis -- especially the drug and alcohol use of a resident of 1962 he supposedly cares about. Then he finds his compassion because he remembers he is the exception in being able to see beyond the immediate -- and foreboding -- horizon.

I feel to that the gap between my new life in New York and the situation at home in Africa is stretching into a gulf, as Zimbabwe spirals downwards into a violent dictatorship. My head bulges with the effort to contain both worlds. When I am back in New York, Africa immediately seems fantastical – a wildly plumaged bird, as exotic as it is unlikely. Most of us struggle in life to maintain the illusion of control, but in Africa that illusion is almost impossible to maintain. I always have the sense there that there is no equilibrium, that everything perpetually teeters on the brink of some dramatic change, that society constantly stands poised for some spasm, some tsunami in which you can do nothing but hope to bob up to the surface and not be sucked out into a dark and hungry sea. The origin of my permanent sense of unease, my general foreboding, is probably the fact that I have lived through just such change, such a sudden and violent upending of value systems. In my part of Africa, death is never far away. With more Zimbabweans dying in their early thirties now, mortality has a seat at every table. The urgent, tugging winds themselves seem to whisper the message, memento mori, you too shall die. In Africa, you do not view death from the auditorium of life, as a spectator, but from the edge of the stage, waiting only for your cue. You feel perishable, temporary, transient. You feel mortal. Maybe that is why you seem to live more vividly in Africa. The drama of life there is amplified by its constant proximity to death. That’s what infuses it with tension. It is the essence of its tragedy too. People love harder there. Love is the way that life forgets that it is terminal. Love is life’s alibi in the face of death. For me, the illusion of control is much easier to maintain in England or America. In this temperate world, I feel more secure, as if change will only happen incrementally, in manageable, finely calibrated, bite-sized portions. There is a sense of continuity threaded through it all: the anchor of history, the tangible presence of antiquity, of buildings, of institutions. You live in the expectation of reaching old age. At least you used to. But on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, those two states of mind converge. Suddenly it feels like I am back in Africa, where things can be taken away from you at random, in a single violent stroke, as quick as the whip of a snake’s head. Where tumult is raised with an abruptness that is as breathtaking as the violence itself.

For quite some time now, like the foetus inside a womb, a terrible knowledge had been ripening within me and filling my soul with frightened foreboding: that the Infinite Universe is inflating at incredible speed, like some ridiculous soap bubble. I become obsessed with a miser's piercing anxiety whenever I allow myself to think that the Universe may be slipping out into space, like water through cupped hands, and that, ultimately—perhaps even today, perhaps not till tomorrow or for several light years—it will dissolve for ever into emptiness, as though it were made not of solid matter but only of fleeting sound.

Dis-moi, Sophie,' she said, admiring the glow of candlelight on silk. 'What are a few drops of blood?

Sometimes one feels suddenly doomed by fate.

Birds and periodic blood. Old recapitulations. The fox, panting, fire-eyed, gone to earth in my chest. How beautiful we are, he and I, with our auburn pelts, our trails of blood, our miracle escapes, our whiplash panic flogging us on to new miracles! They’ve supplied us with pills for bleeding, pills for panic. Wash them down the sink. This is truth, then: dull needle groping for the spinal fluid, weak acid in the bottom of the cup, foreboding, foreboding. No one tells the truth about truth, that it’s what the fox sees from his scuffled burrow: dull-jawed, onrushing killer, being that inanely single-minded will have our skins at last.

Proverbs 15:15: “All the days of the desponding and afflicted are made evil [by anxious thoughts and forebodings], but he who has a glad heart has a continual feast [regardless of circumstances].” I realized at that time that most of my life had been made miserable by evil thoughts and forebodings. Yes, I had circumstances that were very difficult, but even when I didn’t, I was still miserable because my thoughts were poisoning my outlook and robbing me of ability to enjoy life and see good days. Even if nothing bad was happening at the time, I always vaguely sensed that something bad was about to happen. Because of that I was unable to really enjoy my life.

There can be, if I forebode aright, no power, short of the Divine mercy, to disclose, whether by uttered words, or by type or emblem, the secrets that may be buried with a human heart. The heart, making itself guilty of such secrets, must perforce hold them, until the day when all hidden things shall be revealed. Nor have I so read or interpreted the Holy Writ, as to understand that the disclosure of human thoughts and deeds, then to be made, is intended as part of the retribution. That, surely, were a shallow view of it. No; these revelations, unless I greatly error, are meant merely to promote the intellectual satisfaction of all intelligent beings, who will stand waiting, on that day, to see the dark problem of this life made plain. A knowledge of men's hearts will be needful to the completest solution of that problem. And I conceive, moreover, that the hearts holding such secrets as you speak of will yield them up, at that last day, not with reluctance, but with a joy unutterable.

“Shut up!” I say, laughing hysterically. Alice transforms back to an inanimate jade piece as I toss her. My aim is off and she plops into Morpheus’s tea, splattering him and the chessboard. With a graceful sweep of his hand, he retracts his magic. Tea drizzles down his face as his inky eyes turn up to mine, alight with something both dangerous and daring, shifting moods faster than I can blink. “Careful, plum.” It’s his deep cockney accent now. He wipes his face with a napkin. “Don’t start something you have no intention of finishing.” “Oh, I’ll finish it,” I say—spurred by the dark confidence fluttering at the edge of my psyche. The side of me that knows I’m his match in every way. “And you know I’ll win.” I rise from my chair to scope out the room for weapons, vaguely aware of the prisms of glittery light reflected off my skin onto the surroundings. “I know I’ll let you win,” Morpheus says, standing up. “I won’t even put up a fight.” His white-toothed smile spans to something forebodingly provocative, as though mimicking the spread of his wings. “Well, perhaps a small one, just for sport.”

In the fairytales, when the knight in shining armor is killed defending his fair maiden, she brings him back to life with a magical kiss, and they live happily ever after. But this wasn’t that sort of fairytale.

I wandered aimlessly through this muddy lane bespattered with blood, fragments of the past detached themselves and floated listlessly before my eyes, taunting me with the direst forebodings [...] My world of human beings had perished; I was utterly alone in the world and for friends I had the streets, and the streets spoke to me in that sad, bitter language compounded of human misery, yearning, regret, failure, wasted effort

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

She did not want to be moved or bothered or distracted ('No, don't do anything yet, don't do anything, just wait'), nor did she want voices or movement around her, as if she were so full of foreboding that she preferred everything about her to be in a state of utter paralysis and preferred to remain on the situation and posture that at least allowed her to go on living rather than risk any variation, however minimal, that might upset the temporary and precious stability.

Of the Three Rings that the Elves had preserved unsullied no open word was ever spoken among the Wise, and few even of the Eldar knew where they were bestowed. Yet after the fall of Sauron their power was ever at work, and where they abode there mirth also dwelt and all things were unstained by the griefs of time. Therefore ere the Third Age was ended the Elves perceived that the Ring of Sapphire was with Elrond, in the fair valley of Rivendell, upon whose house the stars of heaven most brightly shone; whereas the Ring of Adamant was in the Land of Lórien where dwelt the Lady Galadriel. A queen she was of the woodland Elves, the wife of Celeborn of Doriath, yet she herself was of the Noldor and remembered the Day before days in Valinor, and she was the mightiest and fairest of all the Elves that remained in Middle-earth. But the Red Ring remained hidden until the end, and none save Elrond and Galadriel and Cirdan knew to whom it had been committed. Thus it was that in two domains the bliss and beauty of the Elves remained still undiminished while that Age endured: in Imladris; and in Lothlórien, the hidden land between Celebrant and Anduin, where the trees bore flowers of gold and no Orc or evil thing dared ever come. Yet many voices were heard among the Elves foreboding that, if Sauron should come again, then either he would find the Ruling Ring that was lost, or at the best his enemies would discover it and destroy it; but in either chance the powers of the Three must then fail and all things maintained by them must fade, and so the Elves should pass into the twilight and the Dominion of Men begin. And so indeed it has since befallen: the One and the Seven and the Nine are destroyed; and the Three have passed away, and with them the Third Age is ended, and the Tales of the Eldar in Middle-earth draw to then-close.

She spent a great deal of time staring into space, oppressed by the sense that she was waiting. But waiting for what? She did not know. Surely someone would call, someone must be needing her. Yet each day proceeded like the one before. Nothing intense, nothing desperate, ever happened. Time did not move. The home, the city, the nation, and life itself were eternal; still she had a foreboding that one day, without warning and without pity, all the dear, important things would be destroyed.

But as he stood watching Carthage burn, Scipio Aemilianus reflected on the fate of this once great power. Overcome with emotion, he cried. His friend and mentor Polybius approached and asked why Aemilianus was crying—what better outcome could any man hope for? Aemilianus replied, “A glorious moment, Polybius; but I have a dread foreboding that some day the same doom will be pronounced on my own country.” According to Roman tradition Aemilianus then quoted a line from Homer: “A day will come when sacred Troy shall perish, And Priam and his people shall be slain.” Aemilianus knew that no power endures indefinitely, that all empires must fall, and that there is nothing mortals can do about it.

But, oh, how sweet it was to love for once with the love of real life; for now he knew that nothing of what he had imagined to be love was real love, neither the turgid longing of the lonely youth, nor the passionate yearning of the dreamer, nor yet the nervous foreboding of the child. These were currents in the ocean of love, single reflections of its full light, fragments of love as the meteors rushing through space are splinters of a world--for that was love; a world complete in itself, fully rounded, vast, and orderly. It was no medley of confused sensations and moods rushing one upon another! Love was like nature, ever changing, ever renewing; no feeling died and no emotion withered without giving life to the seed of something still more perfect which was embedded in it.

But then a foreboding thought cast a shadow over the rest, blunt and unadorned, and it was simply this: that for most of my life i had been emulating the thoughts and actions of other people. That so much I had done or said had been a mirror of what was said and done around me. And that if i continued in this manner, whatever glimmers of brilliant life still burned in me would soon go out. When i was very young it had been otherwise, but I could hardly recall that time, it was buried so far below. I was only certain that a period had existed in which i looked at the things of the world without needing to subordinate them to order. I simply saw, with whatever originality I was born with, the whole of things, without needing to give them a human translation. I would never again be able to see like that, I knew that, and yet, lying there, it seemed to me that I'd failed to fulfill the promise of that vision I once had, before i began to slowly learn to look at everything the way others looked, and to copy the things they said and did, and to shape my life after theirs, as if no other range of being had occurred to me.

Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

We are all regularly presented, day after day, with bad news, the worst, and I think our minds are more and more set into attitudes of foreboding and depression. But is it possible that all the bad things going on – and I don’t have to list them, for we all know what they are – are a reaction, a dragging undertow, to a forward movement in the human social evolution that we can’t easily see? Perhaps, looking back, let’s say in a century or two centuries, is it possible people will say, ‘That was a time when extremes battled for supremacy. The human mind was developing very fast in the direction of self-knowledge, self-command, and as always happens, as always has to happen, this thrust forward aroused its opposite, the forces of stupidity, brutality, mob thinking’? I think it is possible. I think that this is what is happening.

At work, foreboding joy often shows up in more subtle and pernicious ways. It shows up by making us hesitant to celebrate victories, for two primary reasons. The first is that we’re afraid if we celebrate with our team, or have a moment where we just breathe, we’re inviting disaster and something will go wrong. You can likely identify with that feeling of getting a project up and out the door and then refusing to celebrate it with high-fives because you think, We can’t celebrate right now because we don’t know if it’s going to be perfect, we don’t know if it’s going to work, we don’t know if the site will stay up… The second way foreboding joy shows up at work is withholding recognition. We don’t want our employees to get too excited because there’s still so much work to be done. We don’t want them to take their foot off the gas, to get complacent. So we don’t celebrate achievements. We think we’ll do it someday, but these same factors persist in the wake of joy. This is how foreboding joy shows up at the office, and it is a costly mistake.

1 I don't believe in omens or fear Forebodings. I flee from neither slander Nor from poison. Death does not exist. Everyone's immortal. Everything is too. No point in fearing death at seventeen, Or seventy. There's only here and now, and light; Neither death, nor darkness, exists. We're all already on the seashore; I'm one of those who'll be hauling in the nets When a shoal of immortality swims by. 2 If you live in a house - the house will not fall. I'll summon any of the centuries, Then enter one and build a house in it. That's why your children and your wives Sit with me at one table, - The same for ancestor and grandson: The future is being accomplished now, If I raise my hand a little, All five beams of light will stay with you. Each day I used my collar bones For shoring up the past, as though with timber, I measured time with geodetic chains And marched across it, as though it were the Urals. 3 I tailored the age to fit me. We walked to the south, raising dust above the steppe; The tall weeds fumed; the grasshopper danced, Touching its antenna to the horse-shoes - and it prophesied, Threatening me with destruction, like a monk. I strapped my fate to the saddle; And even now, in these coming times, I stand up in the stirrups like a child. I'm satisfied with deathlessness, For my blood to flow from age to age. Yet for a corner whose warmth I could rely on I'd willingly have given all my life, Whenever her flying needle Tugged me, like a thread, around the globe.

Very likely some Mrs. Grundy will observe, "I don't believe it, boys will be boys, young men must sow their wild oats, and women must not expect miracles." I dare say you don't, Mrs. Grundy, but it's true nevertheless. Women work a good many miracles, and I have a persuasion that they may perform even that of raising the standard of manhood by refusing to echo such sayings. Let the boys be boys, the longer the better, and let the young men sow their wild oats if they must. But mothers, sisters, and friends may help to make the crop a small one, and keep many tares from spoiling the harvest, by believing, and showing that they believe, in the possibility of loyalty to the virtues which make men manliest in good women's eyes. If it is a feminine delusion, leave us to enjoy it while we may, for without it half the beauty and the romance of life is lost, and sorrowful forebodings would embitter all our hopes of the brave, tenderhearted little lads, who still love their mothers better than themselves and are not ashamed to own it. Laurie

I really, really, really would be forever indebted to you if you just revealed how you did one trick. Just one, that’s all I’m asking for.” Jay wipes his mouth with a napkin, his lips forming a smirk. “When you say ‘forever indebted,’ just what are we talking about here?” Jessie makes a foreboding sound. “No way, sweetheart. You don’t want to do that. This fucker’s a slave driver when you owe him.” “Okay, well, maybe I won’t be forever in your debt. Perhaps I was getting a little carried away with myself. If you tell me one trick, I’ll owe you one thing in return. You can decide, but it has to be reasonable, like washing your car or something.” Jay leans forward and steeples his fingers in front of him. “Will you wash my car topless?” he asks huskily. My cheeks colour, and Jessie lets out a bark of a laugh. “Oh, now, that is a good idea.” “Okay, let me amend my offer. I will owe you, but it can’t be sexual.” “Topless isn’t sexual,” says Jay. “Topless is natural.” “I second that,” Jessie adds. “How about braless?” Jay goes on. God, these two. Why do I even bother? “Fine. I retract my offer,” I huff, sitting back in my seat and folding my arms.

In three days, as the King had said, Éomer of Rohan came riding to the City, and with him came an éored of the fairest knights of the Mark. He was welcomed; and when they sat all at table in Merethrond, the Great Hall of Feasts, he beheld the beauty of the ladies that he saw and was filled with great wonder. And before he went to his rest he sent for Gimli the Dwarf, and he said to him: ‘Gimli Glóin’s son, have you your axe ready?’ ‘Nay, lord,’ said Gimli, ‘but I can speedily fetch it, if there be need.’ ‘You shall judge,’ said Éomer. ‘For there are certain rash words concerning the Lady in the Golden Wood that lie still between us. And now I have seen her with my eyes.’ ‘Well, lord,’ said Gimli, ‘and what say you now?’ ‘Alas!’ said Éomer. ‘I will not say that she is the fairest lady that lives.’ ‘Then I must go for my axe,’ said Gimli. ‘But first I will plead this excuse,’ said Éomer. ‘Had I seen her in other company, I would have said all that you could wish. But now I will put Queen Arwen Evenstar first, and I am ready to do battle on my own part with any who deny me. Shall I call for my sword?’ Then Gimli bowed low. ‘Nay, you are excused for my part, lord,’ he said. ‘You have chosen the Evening; but my love is given to the Morning. And my heart forebodes that soon it will pass away for ever.

The ruinous deeds of the ravaging foe (Beowulf) The best-known long text in Old English is the epic poem Beowulf. Beowulf himself is a classic hero, who comes from afar. He has defeated the mortal enemy of the area - the monster Grendel - and has thus made the territory safe for its people. The people and the setting are both Germanic. The poem recalls a shared heroic past, somewhere in the general consciousness of the audience who would hear it. It starts with a mention of 'olden days', looking back, as many stories do, to an indefinite past ('once upon a time'), in which fact blends with fiction to make the tale. But the hero is a mortal man, and images of foreboding and doom prepare the way for a tragic outcome. He will be betrayed, and civil war will follow. Contrasts between splendour and destruction, success and failure, honour and betrayal, emerge in a story which contains a great many of the elements of future literature. Power, and the battles to achieve and hold on to power, are a main theme of literature in every culture - as is the theme of transience and mortality. ................ Beowulf can be read in many ways: as myth; as territorial history of the Baltic kingdoms in which it is set; as forward-looking reassurance. Questions of history, time and humanity are at the heart of it: it moves between past, present, and hope for the future, and shows its origins in oral tradition. It is full of human speech and sonorous images, and of the need to resolve and bring to fruition a proper human order, against the enemy - whatever it be - here symbolised by a monster and a dragon, among literature's earliest 'outsiders'. ....... Beowulf has always attracted readers, and perhaps never more than in the 1990s when at least two major poets, the Scot Edwin Morgan and the Irishman Seamus Heaney, retranslated it into modern English. Heaney's version became a worldwide bestseller, and won many awards, taking one of the earliest texts of English literature to a vast new audience.

A desire to attain short-term happiness while laboring under the weight a looming death sentence is an obvious paradox. Suicide, as distinguished from medical euthanasia, is an emotional reaction to the absurdity of life. Suicide is a panic-stricken reflex induced by the sinister twins of fear and foreboding. A rational person does not commit self-murder because their longing for happiness is incongruent with their present day reality. Suicide is a superficial response to hard times; suicide is a pusillanimous solution. A more measured reaction and, therefore, ultimately a braver and logical tactic is to meet life’s pillbox of irrationality headfirst. Upon soul-searching reflection, a thinking person accepts that while he or she might never comprehend a unifying meaning of life they still prefer to experience each permitted day of life to the fullest. A pragmatic person accepts the cold fact that happiness is fleeting and death is inevitable. By acknowledging and accepting the underlying absurdity of life, the prisoner awakens to discover his own humanity. By refusing to cooperate with death, by working each day to expand personal consciousness, by savoring each moment of life regardless of its hazards, adversities, misfortunes, and seemingly lack of overriding purpose, an impertinent ward of time transcends his or her incarnate incarceration.

Antidepression medication is temperamental. Somewhere around fifty-nine or sixty I noticed the drug I’d been taking seemed to have stopped working. This is not unusual. The drugs interact with your body chemistry in different ways over time and often need to be tweaked. After the death of Dr. Myers, my therapist of twenty-five years, I’d been seeing a new doctor whom I’d been having great success with. Together we decided to stop the medication I’d been on for five years and see what would happen... DEATH TO MY HOMETOWN!! I nose-dived like the diving horse at the old Atlantic City steel pier into a sloshing tub of grief and tears the likes of which I’d never experienced before. Even when this happens to me, not wanting to look too needy, I can be pretty good at hiding the severity of my feelings from most of the folks around me, even my doctor. I was succeeding well with this for a while except for one strange thing: TEARS! Buckets of ’em, oceans of ’em, cold, black tears pouring down my face like tidewater rushing over Niagara during any and all hours of the day. What was this about? It was like somebody opened the floodgates and ran off with the key. There was NO stopping it. 'Bambi' tears... 'Old Yeller' tears... 'Fried Green Tomatoes' tears... rain... tears... sun... tears... I can’t find my keys... tears. Every mundane daily event, any bump in the sentimental road, became a cause to let it all hang out. It would’ve been funny except it wasn’t. Every meaningless thing became the subject of a world-shattering existential crisis filling me with an awful profound foreboding and sadness. All was lost. All... everything... the future was grim... and the only thing that would lift the burden was one-hundred-plus on two wheels or other distressing things. I would be reckless with myself. Extreme physical exertion was the order of the day and one of the few things that helped. I hit the weights harder than ever and paddleboarded the equivalent of the Atlantic, all for a few moments of respite. I would do anything to get Churchill’s black dog’s teeth out of my ass. Through much of this I wasn’t touring. I’d taken off the last year and a half of my youngest son’s high school years to stay close to family and home. It worked and we became closer than ever. But that meant my trustiest form of self-medication, touring, was not at hand. I remember one September day paddleboarding from Sea Bright to Long Branch and back in choppy Atlantic seas. I called Jon and said, “Mr. Landau, book me anywhere, please.” I then of course broke down in tears. Whaaaaaaaaaa. I’m surprised they didn’t hear me in lower Manhattan. A kindly elderly woman walking her dog along the beach on this beautiful fall day saw my distress and came up to see if there was anything she could do. Whaaaaaaaaaa. How kind. I offered her tickets to the show. I’d seen this symptom before in my father after he had a stroke. He’d often mist up. The old man was usually as cool as Robert Mitchum his whole life, so his crying was something I loved and welcomed. He’d cry when I’d arrive. He’d cry when I left. He’d cry when I mentioned our old dog. I thought, “Now it’s me.” I told my doc I could not live like this. I earned my living doing shows, giving interviews and being closely observed. And as soon as someone said “Clarence,” it was going to be all over. So, wisely, off to the psychopharmacologist he sent me. Patti and I walked in and met a vibrant, white-haired, welcoming but professional gentleman in his sixties or so. I sat down and of course, I broke into tears. I motioned to him with my hand; this is it. This is why I’m here. I can’t stop crying! He looked at me and said, “We can fix this.” Three days and a pill later the waterworks stopped, on a dime. Unbelievable. I returned to myself. I no longer needed to paddle, pump, play or challenge fate. I didn’t need to tour. I felt normal.

At times I can certainly see a subject clearly and distinctly, think my way through it, great sweeping thoughts that I can scarcely grasp but which all at once give me an intense feeling of importance. Yet when I try to write them down they shrivel into nothing, and that's why I lack the courage to commit them to paper - in case I become too disillusioned with the fatuous little as they that emerges. But let me impress just one thing upon you, sister. Wash your hands of all attempts to embody those great, sweeping thoughts. The smallest, most fatuous little essay is worth more than the flood of grandiose ideas in which you like to wallow. Of course you must hold on to your forebodings and your intuitions. They are the sources upon which you draw, but be careful not to drown in them. Just organise things a little, exercise some mental hygiene. Your imagination and your emotions are like a vast ocean from which you wrest small pieces of land that may well be flooded again. The ocean is wide and elemental, but what matter are the small pieces of land you reclaim from it. The subject right before you is more important than those prodigious thoughts of Tolstoy and Napoleon that occurred to you in the middle of last night, and the lesson you gave that keen young girl and Friday night is more important than all your vague philosophizing. Never forget that. Don't overestimate your own intensity; it may give you the impression that you were cut out for greater things than the so-called men in the street, who's inner life is a closed book to you. In fact, you're no more than a weakling and a non-entity adrift and tossed by the waves. Keep your eyes fixed on the mainland and don't flounder helplessly in the ocean.