THIS EDITION: omen
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Quoted In The Grove:
As for omens, there is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that.
~Oscar Wilde
Ask for an omen, then stone it when it comes — de essentia hominum.
~Walter M Miller, Jr
I suspect that we are all recipients of cosmic love notes. Messages, omens, voices, cries, revelations, and appeals are homogenized into each day’s events. If only we knew how to listen, to read the signs.
~Sam Keen
EndQuote:
Omens are everywhere in this world you just have to find the one that fits.
~Terry Pratchett
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Next Prompt: brief
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It is easy to see things in retrospect. But I was ignorant then of everything but my own happiness, and I don’t know what else to say except that life itself seemed very magical in those days: a web of symbol, coincidence, premonition, omen. Everything, somehow, fit together; some sly and benevolent Providence was revealing itself by degrees and I felt myself trembling on the brink of a fabulous discovery, as though any morning it was all going to come together–my future, my past, the whole of my life–and I was going to sit up in bed like a thunderbolt and say oh! oh! oh!
~Donna Tartt
When struck by a thunderbolt it is unnecessary to consult the Book of Dates as to the precise meaning of the omen.
~Ernest Bramah
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It is not a good omen to meet a lot of cats when one sets out on a journey, so the Lieutenant spat three times for each cat, as his mother had taught him to do.
~Selma Lagerlöf
The child taught to believe any occurrence a good or evil omen, or any day of the week lucky, hath a wide inroad made upon the soundness of his understanding.
~Isaac Watts
All primitive people are frightened of owls,’ said Harley. ‘The villagers here are scared to death of the gufo. Birds of ill omen. If they see one, they think they’ll die. But they never do. See one, I mean, of course,’ he added with a laugh.
~Francis Brett Young
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There is something in omens.
~Ovid
Maybe nothing’s so unfunny as an omen read wrong.
~Michael Herr
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Posted From The Grove
Without a sign, his sword the brave man draws,
and asks no omen, but his country’s cause.
~Homer
Bees are a good omen to Kings, for they signify an obsequious people.
~Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa
Caesar recognized the omens, but he didn’t believe they applied to him.
~Nate Silver
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Battles, revolutions, pestilence, famine, and death, are never the effect of those natural causes, which we experience. Prodigies,omens, oracles, judgments, quite obscure the few natural events, that are intermingled with them. But as the former grow thinner every page, we soon learn, that there is nothing mysterious or supernatural in the case, but that all proceeds from the usual propensity of mankind towards the marvellous, and that, though this inclination may at intervals receive a check from sense and learning, it can never be thoroughly extirpated.
~David Hume
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If the black man is feeble and not important to the existing races, not on a parity with the best race, the black man must serve, and be exterminated. But if the black man carries in his bosom an indispensable element of a new and coming civilization; for the sake of that element, no wrong nor strength nor circumstance can hurt him: he will survive and play his part. So now, the arrival in the world of such men as Toussaint, and the Haytian heroes, or of the leaders of their race in Barbadoes and Jamaica, outweighs in good omen all the English and American humanity.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Arms are instruments of ill omen…. When one is compelled to use them, it is best to do so without relish. There is no glory in victory, and to glorify it despite this is to exult in the killing of men.
~Laozi
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Why are we talking about this good and evil? They’re just names for sides. We know that.
~Neil Gaiman, Good Omens
It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.
~Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens
(They) weren’t, when you got right down to it, particularly evil. Human beings mostly aren’t. They just get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in jackboots and shooting people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or dressing up in tie-dye jeans and playing guitars at people. Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow.
~Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens
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Someone’s thoughts for the new year, a refresher course, some humor
~Medium.com: Shannon Hilson • 8 Life Lessons Learned at 40
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~Thesaurus.com: The Top 41 Rhetorical Devices That Will Make Your Words Memorable
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~Terry Pratchett: Good Omens • Lockdown (3:40) from the book
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~The Fandom Fairy: Good Omens • Mixed Messages (1:23) mishmash recaps, the TV show
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To prove that Wall Street is an early omen of movements still to come in GNP, commentators quote economic studies alleging that market downturns predicted four out of the last five recessions. That is an understatement. Wall Street indexes predicted nine out of the last five recessions! And its mistakes were beauties.
~Paul Samuelson (economist)
See them demons and them omens staring at you, mind control, they want your soul. If he don’t see a dollar, somebody visiting Satan.
~Jay Rock
When someone asks to sign on the money I always refuse. Bad omen.
~Alexander Ovechkin
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Roy Keane [Irish soccer] is Damien, the devil incarnate off the film The Omen. He’s evil. Even in training.
~Ryan Giggs
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It’s important to make an effort under any circumstance ‒ stagnant, sickness, being in an unstable lifestyle, even when society is insane. You should consider such periods as an omen before you move. When you are stuck on something, it is important to hold to your purpose but not press onward against the current. When you can’t move at all, try to concentrate, continuing forward as if in a boat switching to a stronger motor. The keiko that is most important when you cannot move is kage no keiko [shadow training].
~Masaaki Hatsumi (martial arts)
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§ VIDEO:
Anyone can do shock value. Develop enough tension and cue the music right, then have something jump out: It’s almost impossible not to jump in your seat. But that doesn’t leave any effect on you when you leave the movie theater. To me, the best horror is psychological horror. The Exorcist, The Shining, The Omen, things that kind of stick with you long after you’ve seen them. It’s what you don’t see. It’s letting the audience think a little bit, not spelling it out for them. Giving them credit for using their own imaginations rather than sticking in gags and tricks.
~Daniel Myrick
I remember driving home from a movie ‒ it wasn’t Halloween but another one, maybe the original Omen ‒ and I dropped my friends off, and it was also broad daylight, and yet I was sure that, like, Damien was in the backseat or something like that.
~Thomas Gibson
Oh I love horror movies, yeah. I think my favorite movie growing up was The Omen. I actually wanted to be that little kid.
~Norman Reedus
The Omen is one of my favorites. Even though I’m an atheist now, I was brought up Catholic and can remember thinking that it could actually be real!
~Nick Frost
Of the big horror movies of the ’70s, you have ‘The Omen, The Sentinel, Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, Burnt Offerings ‒ these are all romantic fatalist movies where there’s a sort of glimmer of hope… but darkness wins.
~Chuck Palahniuk
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With The Omen, I really felt I wasn’t in control. It was panic.
~Richard Donner (producer)
The Omen, The Exorcist,’ those movies for me are the quintessential horror movies that still scare me as an adult.
~Fede Alvarez
It was hard for my friends to equate me with a picture like The Omen.
~David Seltzer
I love The Omen, just as a piece of plotting.
~Greg Rucka
I think you need to see parts one, two, and three of The Omen. And then just skip the ending of number three ‒ it’s so bad it makes me want to put my foot through the TV.
~Tobias Forge
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One of the highlights of the first Good Omens tour was Neil and I walking through New York singing Shoehorn with Teeth. Well, we’d had a good breakfast. And you don’t get mugged, either.
~Terry Pratchett
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~Andrea Gatopoulos: Happy New Year, Jim (9:25) a real holiday in a fake world that feels nearly real, the year pixels replaced people
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~École des Nouvelles Images: BOOM (6:40) warm hearted animation
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~Omeleto: Written By (15:09) on discovering one is a written character
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~Omeleto: Carl the Exorcist (9:59) comic horror
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The ancients often believed a celestial event like an eclipse to be a bad omen, that the sun or the moon vanishing from the sky was a harbinger of disaster, a sign of devastation or destruction to come.
~Jenna Wortham
Dabbling in astrology is like carrying a lucky rabbit’s foot as an omen of good luck which costs us very little and might have some beneficial effects.
~Siegfried Fred Singer
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Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river! Dreams! adorations! illumnations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
~Allen Ginsberg
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Ancient history is oddly short on incorrect omens.
~Stacy Schiff
Such is the way of all superstition, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like; wherein men, having a delight in such vanities, mark the events where they are fulfilled, but where they fail, though this happen much oftener.
~Francis Bacon
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“Take these,” said the old man, holding out a white stone and a black stone that had been embedded at the center of the breastplate. “They are called Urim and Thummim. The black signifies ‘yes,’ and the white ‘no.’ When you are unable to read the omens, they will help you to do so. Always ask an objective question.
~Paulo Coelho
The casinos believe in math (and I don’t mean numerology).They believe in the power of percentages and short pays, not in the power of magic stones, amulets and omens.
~Frank Scoblete
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Prohibit the taking of omens, and do away with superstitious doubts. Then, until death itself comes, no calamity need be feared.
~Sun Tzu
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§ MUSIC:
For time not only moves inexorable forward, as the underlying grid to our personal chronicle, but is manipulated by our psychic needs and natures into various images of timelessness and timeliness. Transient moments suddenly expand, visions of infinity intervene, notes and phrases become outlets of fantasy, escape, recollection, or omen. The music travels on two planes, chronological time and psychological time. Both planes are essential and must be abundantly represented.
~Russell Sherman
The riffs, lyrics, and drums of Open Your Omen will tell you a lot.
~Joey Jordison
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I’ve dreamed landscapes for years, and my dreams play an enormous role in my work. In fact, when I first started doing landscapes I felt insecure about painting in this style, and the dreams were like positive omens for me, and I’ve done a few paintings that were exact replicas of images that came to me in dreams.
~April Gornik
The New York art world readily proves people wrong. Just when folks say that things stink and flibbertigibbet critics wish the worst on us all because we’re not pure enough, good omens appear.
~Jerry Saltz
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Salomé, Salomé, dance for me. I pray thee dance for me. I am sad to-night. Yes, I am passing sad to-night. When I came hither I slipped in blood, which is an evil omen; and I heard, I am sure I heard in the air a beating of wings, a beating of giant wings. I cannot tell what they mean …. I am sad to-night. Therefore dance for me. Dance for me, Salomé, I beseech you. If you dance for me you may ask of me what you will, and I will give it you, even unto the half of my kingdom.
~Oscar Wilde
Fashion is primitive in its insistence on exhibitionism, which withers in isolation. The catwalk fashion show with its incandescent hype is its apotheosis. A ritualized gathering of connoiseurs and the spoilt at a spotlit parade of snazzy pulchritude, it is an industrialized version of the pagan festivals of renewal. At the end of each seasonal display, a priesthood is enjoined to carry news of the omens to the masses.
~Stephen Bayley
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~Disclosure: Omen • ft Sam Smith (3:59) beautiful people posing, glamorizing to music
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~Lamb of God: Omens (4:01) heavy metal message
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~ero808: Bad Omens (2:27) featuring eyes, mostly
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~CROSSFAITH: Omen (4:18) energetic cover of a Prodigy classic
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~SPLEENN: Omen (3:36) for EUROVISION 24
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~Sumerian Records: Bad Omens • Just Pretend (3:58) pretty song, tragedy included
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When a nation or family is about to flourish, there are sure to be happy omens; and when it is about to perish, there are sure to be unlucky omens.
~Confucius
When it comes to horror there’s a strange need to analyze. When “evil children” fad happened, there was The Exorcist and The Other and The Omen. People would say, “What this really means is that Americans don’t want to have kids anymore. They feel hostility towards their own children. They feel they’re being tied down and dragged down.” In fact, in most cases, what those books are about is nice children who are beset by forces beyond their control.
~Stephen King
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This was it. Together. Forever. As we left it all behind, the sun warmed my back, lighting the way before us. I knew of no better omen.
~Becca Fitzpatrick
But, for a little while, this is the place for us ‒ a good place too ‒a place of good omen, a place of beginning things ‒ and of ending things I never thought would end.
~Beryl Markham
Love is universal migraine,
A bright stain on the vision
Blotting out reason.
Symptoms of true love
Are leanness, jealousy,
Laggard dawns;
Are omens and nightmares ‒
Listening for a knock,
Waiting for a sign:
For a touch of her fingers
In a darkened room,
For a searching look.
Take courage, lover!
Could you endure such pain
At any hand but hers?
~Robert Graves
That’s sexism, that is. Going around giving people girly presents just because they’re a girl.
~Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens
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First you buy me a mocha. Then you let me help you hide a body. Now you take me to a biker clubhouse. Best. Day. Ever.
~Kelley Armstrong, Omens
“Yes I remember my sixteenth.” Vitellius said “Wonderful omen! Happily chicken in my underpants.” “Excuse me.”
~Rick Riordan
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Among Negroes it is a bad omen when someone knocks on the door of a house where a person has died.
~Ethel Waters
We give each other a wide berth even if we have the flu, let alone… So, I think that’s part of the stigma that people who have diseases suffer. It’s almost infectious… if somebody is closer to death, they’re almost a bad omen and I think that’s terrible.
~Peter Morgan
It seemed incredible that this day, a day without warnings or omens, might be that of my implacable death.
~Jorge Luis Borges
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Burney Falls
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You don’t have to test everything to destruction just to see if you make it right.
~Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens
Say what you like. Plutonium may give you grief for thousands of years, but arsenic is forever.
~Terry Pratchett, Good Omens
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I remember once going to see him [Ramanujan] when he was lying ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi-cab No. 1729, and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavourable omen. “No,” he replied, “it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as a sum of two cubes in two different ways.”
~G H Hardy
When a Pueblo Indian does not feel in the right mood, he stays away from the men’s council. When an ancient Roman stumbled on the threshold as he left the house, he gave up his plans for the day. This seems to us senseless, but under primitive conditions of life such an omen inclines one at least to be cautious. When I am not in full control of myself, my bodily movements may be under a certain constraint; my attention is easily distracted; I am somewhat absent-minded. As a result I knock against something, stumble, let something fall, or forget something.
~Carl Jung
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There’s one thing you can say for air pollution, you get utterly amazing sunrises.
~Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Good Omens
The vixen I met at twilight on Route 5 south of Willoughby: long dead. She was an omen to me, surviving, herding her cubs in the silvery bend of the road in nineteen sixty-five.
~Adrienne Rich
The world was bright and strange and he was in the middle of it.
~Neil Gaiman, Good Omens
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At issue is not only knowledge of the world but our survival as individuals and as a species. All the basic technologies ever invented by humans to feed and protect themselves depend on a relentless commitment to hard-nosed empiricism: you cannot assume that your arrowheads will pierce the hide of a bison or that your raft will float just because the omens are propitious and you have been given supernatural reassurance that they will. You have to be sure.
~Barbara Ehrenreich
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@Writers Platform
She is a sly one. Mostly at night we commune. Night. Harbinger of dream and nightmare and bearer of omens which defy the music of words. In the morning the fear of her going is very real and very alarming. It can make one tremble. Not that she cares. She is the muse. I am the messenger.
~Edna O’Brien
The philosopher, who with calm suspicion examines the dreams and omens, the miracles and prodigies, of profane or even of ecclesiastical history, will probably conclude that, if the eyes of the spectators have sometimes been deceived by fraud, the understanding of the readers has much more frequently been insulted by fiction.
~Edward Gibbon (historian)
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To a novelist, fluidity is the ultimate good omen; suddenly difficult problems are simply solved, intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you come upon the key without even recognizing that this is what you hold.
~Zadie Smith
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Omens are precious, but you already know things you don’t know. You have things to teach yourself that you will never know until you sit down to write.
~author unknown
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Well: the day is a poem but too much
Like one of Jeffers’s,
crusted with blood and barbaric omens
Painful to excess, inhuman as a hawk’s cry.
~Robinson Jeffers
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Prewritten Prompt: omen
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I perceive two things in Scotland of the most fearful omen: ignorance of theological truth, and a readiness to pride themselves in and boast of it.
~Edward Irving
There will always be in society certain persons who are mercuries of its approbation, and whose glance will at any time determine for the curious their standing in the world. These are the chamberlains of the lesser gods. Accept their coldness as an omen of grace with the loftier deities, and allow them all their privilege.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Omens are a language, it’s the alphabet we develop to speak to the world’s soul, or the universe’s, or God’s, whatever name you want to give it. Like an alphabet, it is individual, you only learn it by making mistakes, and that keeps you from globalizing the spiritual quest… My omens are not your omens.
~Paulo Coelho
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The reason I always loved ‘The Omen’ so much, and what has always been scariest to me, is anything to do with God. Anything to do with God is quite frightening because fear is something that’s very much expressed in a church environment, and I grew up in one. And the fear of God was very much instilled me at a very young age.
~KaDee Strickland
God has a prepared path for us to follow. We just have to read the omens he has left for us.
~Paulo Coelho
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The whole world is an omen and a sign. Why look so wistfully in a corner? Man is the Image of God. Why run after a ghost or a dream? The voice of divination resounds everywhere and runs to waste unheard, unregarded, as the mountains echo with the bleatings of cattle.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I am creation’s shadow. You cannot destroy me. That would destroy the world
~Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens
Anyway if you stop telling people it’s all sorted out after they’re dead, they might try sorting it out while they’re alive!
~Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Good Omens
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§ The Exercise:
*past tense
no mystery why
memory rhymes w/ history
as wed does with bed
as women are omen filled
tied to fatal dreams once held
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*augury
once an omen
thence beholden
accept the burden
the rules are olden
the prospect golden
* The tally poem originated in There.com, and contains 5 lines of no more than 25 characters each.
Writing and building for a quest in this world has taken up most of the last several weeks. The brevity of this issue owes to the time given that effort.
~Ed Note
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pointless ditty #16
artisans born of courtesans
politics strictly partisan
talented beauty sold at premium
hot media down to medium
make all the mistakes to be made
rare steaks are at stake
watching broken things break
future’s emporium
hope grows impoverished
integrity diminished
when votes lose their polish
fears follow to their finish
pugnacious popeye without spinach
with nothing left to demolish
promising dreams now just a wish
trees of knowledge were branching
all the arts were out dancing
tilted politics lose at balancing
daily news made more entrancing
when evil omens pretend at amen
and wisdom comes hard, being human
‘twixt good and evil still roamin’
Vote Gree D Hat-red, Beloved Custodian
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5s ‘n 7s
omens, demons, loose women
snares to catch, draw attention
vict’ry snatched, jaws detention
mem’ry banks, laws retention
killing time, chase redemption
love can leave, make no mention
lessons learned, no invention
~
belief cast a spell
sure as heaven has a hell
and ravens, omens
blind faith and nothing’s proven
death pends, then mem’ry’s oven
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The Olio and Salmagundi of Quotes
Amy Cahill didn’t believe in omens. But black snow was falling, the earth was rumbling beneath her feet, her brother was meowing, and her uncle Alistair was prancing on the beach in pink pajamas. She had to admit, the signs were not promising.
~Peter Lerangis
Things which are accidentally the causes either of hope or fear are called good or evil omens.
~Baruch Spinoza
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I had two cups of coffee, put Eric’s jeans in the washer, read a romance for awhile, and studied my brand-new Word of the Day calendar, a Christmas gift from Arlene. My first word of the New Year was ‘exsanguinate’. This was probably not a good omen.
~Charlaine Harris
Enter each day with the expectation that the happenings of the day may contain a clandestine message addressed to you personally. Expect omens, epiphanies, casual blessings and teachers who unknowingly speak to your condition.
~Sam Keen
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Gabriel Walsh comes from a long line of hustlers. He’s just the first one to go to law school and get a license for it.
~Kelley Armstrong, Omens
You can’t start someone off in a muddy shack in the middle of a war zone and expect them to do as well as someone born in a castle.
~Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens
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“That’s trouble. The pixies will sour your milk.”
“I thought it was hobgoblins who soured milk.”
“A dirty lie. Spread by the pixies, no doubt.”
~Kelley Armstrong, Omens
It’d be a funny old world, he reflected, if demons went round trusting one another.
~Terry Pratchet and Neil Gaiman, Good Omens
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Learn to recognize omens, and follow them
~Paulo Coelho
All events became omens; I lost the ability to take anything literally.
~Douglas Coupland
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The Olio
Quotes harvested from: https://azquotes.com, https://bqotd.com, https://brainyquote.com, https://wisesayings.com
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Fun Tarts: https://gocomics.com
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The Salmagundi
Video Harvest: https://venmo.com, https://vimeo.com, https://youtube.com
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