Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Foreshadowings. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Foreshadowings Quotes And Sayings by 98 Authors including Thornton Wilder,Hannah More,Zadie Smith,Wade Rouse,V.e Schwab for you to enjoy and share.
It is well to be attentive to successive ambitions that flood the growing boy's and girl's imagination. They leave profound traces behind them. During those years when the first sap is rising the future tree is foreshadowing its contour. We are shaped by the promises of imagination.
Imagination frames events unknown,
In wild, fantastic shapes of hideous ruin,
And what it fears creates.
All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.
Life sometimes sends out previews - but It never reveals the Surprise Ending.
I like to play with tropes.
Against the sustained tick of a watch, fiction takes the measure of a life, a season, a look exchanged, the turning point, desire as brief as a dream, the grief and terror that after childhood we cease to express.
The value of a novel is not limited to its depiction of emotions and people akin to those in our own life; it stretches to an ability to describe these far better than we would have been able, to put a finger on perceptions that we recognize as our own, but could not have formulated on our own.
I'm fond of implied narratives, oblique angles, and leaving a little room for the viewer to finish a picture.
Psychological complexity, character development, the killer line to end a scene, villains blotched with virtue, heroic characters speckled with villainy, foreshadow and backflash, artful misdirection.
What some people call a nightmare, a writer calls a plot.
The mistakes we make when we try to imagine our personal futures are also lawful, regular, and systematic. They, too, have a pattern that tells us about the powers and limits of foresight in much the same way that optical illusions tell us about the powers and limits of eyesight.
Writing a story bends time and warps reality. It gives the writer prior knowledge in the reader's future...
If we as writers could predict what readers grab on to, we would write it.
It is the test of a novel writer's art that he conceal his snake-in-the-grass; but the reader may be sure that it is always there.
Do you know why the characters in my book look like us?"
"Pure coincidence?" he asked with a smile.
"Because I was fantasizing about us doing all those things together when I wrote it."
"Are you trying to make me cry?
There are few persons, even among the calmest thinkers, who have not occasionally been startled into a vague yet thrilling half credence in the supernatural, by coincidences of so seemingly marvellous a character that, as mere coincidences, the intellect has been unable to receive them.
The arrival of the unforeseen reveals the depths of one's heart.
Literary characters, like my grandmother's apparitions, are fragile beings, easily frightened; they must be treated with care so they will feel comfortable in my pages
Often writers cast their words out prophetically, as a sorceress might cast a spell, and many times when the words return to you, enclosed between covers, your phantom is so fully fleshed out in its own persona, you don't recognize your own creation.
Perhaps the gods will surprise us and it will be neither."
"A true tragedy."
"Of epic proportions."
"Two longstanding rivals."
"And only one robe to bear."
"Who will win?" Darren's tone was wry. "The handsome prince?"
I grinned. "Or his valiant betrothed?
Thus, in this world of brief scenes from the future, few risks are taken. Those who have seen the future do not need to take risks, and those who have not yet seen the future wait for their visions without taking risks.
Fiction demands structures and recognizable shapes. Big surprises only draw attention to the writer's hand.
Do you see that kitten chasing so prettily her own tail? If you could look with her eyes, you might see her surrounded with hundreds of figures performing complex dramas, with tragic and comic issues, long conversations, many characters, many ups and downs of fate.
Storylines from fiction always seem inherently improbable to occur in real life, yet when we read them we are happy to suspend our disbelief, which may simply suggest that in our everyday lives we have an irrational craving for certainty and probability.
Suspense: the only literary tool that has any effect upon tyrants and savages.
Authors do not supply imaginations, they expect their readers to have their own, and to use it
When starting to think about any novel, part of the motive is: I'm going to show them, this time.
It's true that I have very little idea what I shall be writing next, but at the same time I have a powerful premonition of everything that lies ahead of me, even ten years ahead.
When you introduce things that most readers have never seen before into a piece of fiction, you have to describe them with as much precision and in as much detail as possible. What you can eliminate from fiction is the description of things that most readers have seen.
When I am thickening my plots, I like to think 'What if ... What if ... ' Thus my imagination can move from the likely, which everyone can think of, to the unlikely-but-possible, my preferred plot.
I realized that my life of late had consisted of far too much dialogue and not enough exposition. I imagined an angry, bespectacled English teacher slashing his pen through the transcript of my life, wondering how someone could possibly say so much and think so little.
There are tales that rise like the early sun, breathe, and take on a life of their own. There are ones that flow quietly and effortlessly until time forsakes them, but there are others that fight until they find their way to the edge of reality, as if coming straight out of a dream.
The whole process of writing a novel is having this great, beautiful idea and then spoiling it.
Plots come to me at such odd moments, when I am walking along the street, or examining a hat shop ... suddenly a splendid idea comes into my head.
As authors evolve and try to trace the precedents that have shaped their work, it sometimes becomes a matter of identifying the shadowy figure in the back row of the mental photograph, or of grabbing at the tail of a memory that's just slipping out the window into thin air.
One of the biggest problems in literature is the lack of subtlety.
There is a speculative battle innate to imagination this much we know, yet let us not 'bear the wounds'2 of battles' avoided. Petrified imaginaries are the scars of our aversion; calcified thought coagulated into magical formulas of destructive equivalence.
There's almost always a point in a book where something happens that triggers the rest of the plot.
Part of writing a novel is being willing to leap into the blackness. You have very little idea, really, of what's going to happen. You have a broad sense, maybe, but it's this rash leap.
Part of the work of writing a novel is to uncover the symmetries or connections that make it whole, which might not reveal itself at first.
It is striking how our language reveals the visual nature of our thoughts about the future state of affairs. When we invent the future, we try to get a mental picture of what things will be like long before we have begun the journey. Visions are our windows on the world of tomorrow.
When the past dies, there is mourning, but when the future dies our imaginations are compelled to carry it on.
Our griefs, as well as our joys, owe their strongest colors to our imaginations. There is nothing so grievous to be borne that pondering upon it will not make it heavier; and there is no pleasure so vivid that the animation of fancy cannot liven it.
When we read, we are spying on someone else's imagination and inhabiting it; the authors and their characters are momentarily our friends, even if they betray us, or we them.
The author always loads his dice, but he must never let the reader see that he has done so, and by the manipulation of his plot, he can engage the reader's attention so that he does not perceive the violence that has been done to him.
In literature, you know only what you imagine
Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next?
Careful observers may foretell the hour
(By sure prognostics) when to dread a show'r.
While rain depends, the pensive cat gives o'er
Her frolics, and pursues her tail no more.
Like every writer, I'm drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds.
Reading sparks writing.
Premonitions are coincidences waiting to happen.
A writer who wishes to be read by posterity must not be averse to putting hints which might give rise to whole books, or ideas for learned discussions, in some corner of a chapter so that one should think he can afford to throw them away by the thousand.
As sculptors chip away the stone in order to find the statue, writers chip away extraneous verbiage so readers can see the shape of an idea clearly. My gift is to see through the confusion, to bring order and simplicity to a story.
I have designed my style pantomimes as white ink drawings on black backgrounds, so that man's destiny appears as a thread lost in an endless labyrinth. I have tried to shed some gleams of light on the shadow of man startled by his anguish.
Most writers spend their lives standing a little apart from the crowd, watching and listening and hoping to catch that tiny hint of despair, that sliver of malice, that makes them think, 'Aha, here is the story.'
Fiction that responds to recent world events is a hostage to fortune, because all momentous events look very different a year, two years, three years later.
The past overshadows the present foreshadows the future.
Readers, professional or casual, are alert to passages in a book that illuminate what was previously shadowy and formless.
Oh! think what anxious moments pass between
The birth of plots, and their last fatal periods.
Whether tales are told by the light of a campfire or by the glow of a screen, the prime decision for the teller has always been what to reveal and what to withhold. Whether in alone or with images, the narrator should be clear about what is to be shown and what is to be hidden.
We live in an age in which the imagination of the novelist is helpless against what he knows he is going to read in tomorrow's newspaper.
Preparations are good in life, prologues ruinous.
Sometimes, a novel is like a train: the first chapter is a comfortable seat in an attractive carriage, and the narrative speeds up. But there are other sorts of trains, and other sorts of novels. They rush by in the dark; passengers framed in the lighted windows are smiling and enjoying themselves.
I start with a character and a situation, but I don't know what's going to happen until I write it. Sometimes things happen that surprise me.
A good novel should be deeply unsettling - its satisfactions should come from its authenticity and its formal coherence. We must feel something crucial is at stake.
Writers, some of us, may tend to see things before other people do, things that are right there but aren't noticed in the way that a writer might notice.
I want to make it so that so many things happen ... that you didn't expect would happen in this series, that you realize that you have to read every one of them.
the future wasn't something you planned for; it was something that just happened, like your car spinning out on some black ice and hitting a snowbank, or the telephone ringing with bad news in the middle of the night.
I like to think readers appreciate a well-drawn near-future as well as a well-drawn far-future.
Those who make their living flirting with catastrophe develop a faculty of pessimistic imagination, of anticipating the worst, that is often all but indistinguishable from clairvoyance.
The idea is to spin the wheel of metaphors and images until sparks of associations begin to fly for the reader.
Each story, novel, poem and play presents a vision of the world that illuminates the dark cave of life we stumble through. We can see better where we're going, what sudden drop to avoid, where the cool water is running.
The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure.
I often use hypothetical situations to generate information and imagery for paintings and to create a fictional space where a subject can be put into play.
All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new.
Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect.
The truth is, as you know, people like us look at what's happening in the world, and then we project it forward. We think, 'If I know A and B, then I've got to know that C and D are coming,' and that's kind of the way it's been with my fiction.
asked: "And I was very surprised by the ending. Were you?" "Of course not - I'd read it first. I don't think I could have stood the suspense if I hadn't known what was going to happen. I'd have been way too worried.
You think you know how a story begins, or how it's going to turn out, especially when it's your own. You don't.
A great novelist excels on the small scale and the large, the individual leaf and root as well as the forest; good fiction convinces us that the imaginary is real by selecting exactly the right detail and rendering it perfectly.
It's always very important to me to try to create a story that feels unpredictable. You can't jump ahead and see what's coming, but at the end, when you've watched the whole thing, it all feels inevitable.
Plot springs from character ... I've always sort of believed that these people inside me- these characters- know who they are and what they're about and what happens, and they need me to help get it down on paper because they don't type.
This book is concerned with fate. I
Shadows of what you'll become. Silhouettes.
I'm a big fan of things in writing in general that are subtle, that suggest something without actually in-your-face saying it.
How can I demonstrate [ ... ] that I have glimpsed somebody's future recollection?
The things that happen in fiction mirror those things that have happened ---or will happen soon --- in real life.
Writers talk to ghosts.
Stories twist and turn and grow and meet and give birth to other stories. Here and there, one story touches another, and a familiar character, sometimes the hero, walks over the bridge from one story into another.
As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory.
It's the idea that anticipation is as scary as anything in a movie could be. People's imagination is the most effective tool in creating terror or dread.
PROLOGUE CHAPTER
Before I write a novel, images float around in my head that work like icons - they are meaningless in themselves, but serve as reminders.
Sometimes when I am writing, I feel as though I were not reliving the events I describe here, but rather living them. That there is no distance at all, and that I do not know how my story will end. It is an extraordinary sensation, since, of course, I know only too well how it will all end.
I'm a well-intentioned plotter who ends up with wondrous pantsing revelations and (at times) ginormous rewrites that look almost nothing like my carefully plotted plans.
Fiction's essential activity is to imagine how others feel, what a Saturday afternoon in an Italian town in the 2nd Century looked like. My ambition is solely to get some effect, as of light on stone in a forest on a September day.
What fiction offers us is an intimacy shorn of the messy contingencies of human existence - gender, race, class or age. Those moments of transcendence when we exclaim 'You know exactly what I mean!' depend for much of their force on the anonymous character of the intimacy between writer and reader.
Have you ever had the experience of finding in a book some vague idea that's already occurred to you, some obscure image that comes back to you from the depths of your mind, or a perfect expression of your most subtle feelings?
A young reader finding this book today, or the day after tomorrow, is going to have to imagine first a past, and then a future that belongs to that past.
The reader may not see [these meanings], but they have their effect on him nonetheless. This is the way the modern novelist sinks, or hides his theme