David Olusoga

The primitive fight-or-flight regions of our mammalian brains react to immediate danger. We instinctively run from an avalanche but the gradual retreat of a glacier, the portent of the far greater danger of rising temperatures and rising oceans, just doesn't get through to us in the same way.

British Historian

Sherwin B. Nuland

There is, to be sure, sometimes only a small difference between being alert to possible danger and allowing oneself to become terrified to the point of paralysis by seeming or imagined portents.

American Scientist

J. G. Ballard

During the 1960s, the Shanghai of my childhood seemed a portent of the media cities of the future, dominated by advertising and mass circulation newspapers and swept by unpredictable violence.

British Author

Bobbie Ann Mason

My mother watched the skies at evening for a portent of the morrow. A cloud that went over and then turned around and came back was an especially bad sign.

American Novelist

Peter Conrad

The historian's job is to aggrandize, promoting accident to inevitability and innocuous circumstance to portent.

Agnes de Mille

Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times.

American Dancer

Larry McMurtry

American Writer

Portent usually implies a bad outcome, not just any future event.

Negative Association

Use 'portent' in situations where the future event has meaningful impact.

Context Sensitivity

Sometimes 'portent' refers to vague feelings or intuitions of ill-omen.

Not Always Literal

In literature, portents are used to build suspense or hint at plot developments.

Foreshadowing Devices

Literary portents carry deeper meanings beyond their surface appearances.

Symbolic Meanings

Authors use portents to reinforce the themes or moral lessons in their stories.

Enhancing Themes

 by a passing comet. So, rather than an omen of death, the comet that first brought amino acids to Earth could have been a portent of life, a prediction of a distant future, where creatures of stardust