This is a strange book: visionary and dark. It stutters out a kind of music: repeated phrases which accumulate errors and mutate as they go like chromosomes or, as Woodward puts it better, 'visible fissile ribbons. ' It's as if we were present for the moments of creation and extinction. Uncanny Valley is ominous and beautiful.
Yet there's something ominous about turning sixty-five. Suddenly old age is not a phenomenon which will occur; it has occurred.
For Americans war is almost all of the time a nuisance, and military skill is a luxury like Mah-Jongg. But when the issue is brought home to them, war becomes as important, for the necessary period, as business or sport. And it is hard to decide which is likely to be the more ominous for the Axis -- an American decision that this is sport, or that it is business.
I was terrified of the Vietnam War when I was 13. I thought I was going. The draft was such an ominous thing, I felt as if it was going to trickle down to me.
We the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency-a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential. . . the earth has a fever. And the fever is rising. . . Indeed, without realizing it, we have begun to wage war on earth itself.
Why do waiting rooms have to be so ominous?
For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned
William Tavener never heeded ominous forecasts in the domestic horizon, and he never looked for a storm until it broke.
Americans have discovered the fragility of life, that ominous fragility that the rest of the world either already experienced or is experiencing now with terrible intensity.
"Foreboding" and "ominous" is what you're striving to achieve-not mention.
The most ominous of fallacies - the belief that things can be kept static by inaction
Weapons are ominous tools. They are abhorred by all creatures. Anyone who follows the Way shuns them.
This massive ascendancy of corporate power over democratic process is probably the most ominous development since the end of World War II, and for the most part "the free world" seems to be regarding it as merely normal.
If men are obsolete, then women will soon be extinct -- unless we rush down that ominous Brave New World path where women clone themselves by parthenogenesis, as famously do Komodo dragons, hammerhead sharks, and pit vipers.
Thou ominous and fearful owl of death.
Tidiness. . . makes life easier and more agreeable, does harm to no one and actually saves time and trouble to the person who practices it: there must be an ominous flaw to explain why millions of generations continue to reject it.
It would be, in fact, very ominous if Iraq were to be able to get weapon-usable material, hydro-plutonium or highly enriched uranium from abroad.
Weapons are ominous tools. They are not the noble ruler's tools. He only uses them when he can't avoid it.
To all new truths, or renovation of old truths, it must be as in the ark between the destroyed and the about-to-be renovated world. The raven must be sent out before the dove, and ominous controversy must precede peace and the olive wreath.
Under the ominous shadow which the second World War and its attendant circumstances have cast on the world, peace has become as essential to civilized existence as the air we breathe is to life itself.
