GLOUCESTER: These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us. Though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects. Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide; in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked ’twixt son and father. This villain of mine comes under the prediction: there’s son against father. The King falls from bias of nature: there’s father against child. We have seen the best of our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) English dramatist and poet
King Lear, Act 1, sc. 2, l. 109ff (1.2.109-121) (1606)
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portents
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For the world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air.
J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) English writer, fabulist, philologist, academic [John Ronald Reuel Tolkien]
The Lord of the Rings, Vol. 3: The Return of the King, Book 6, ch. 6 “Many Partings” [Treebeard] (1954)
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While Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movie put this in the prologue to The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), and in the mouth of Galadriel, in the book it is spoken by the ent Treebeard to Celeborn and Galadriel, adding, "I do not think we shall meet again."
