Top 66 Astonish Me Quotes
#1. It is all still new to me. I have lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me.
Marilynne Robinson
#2. Maggie Shipstead takes hold of the reader and doesn't let go. Astonish Me is a haunting, powerful novel.
Dani Shapiro
#5. As a former ballerina, I can't put down Maggie Shipstead's new book, Astonish Me.
Caitlin Moran
#6. First move me, astonish me, break my heart, let me tremble, weep, stare, be enraged-only then regale my eyes.
Denis Diderot
#7. You nurslings of Protestantism astonish me. You unguarded Englishwomen walk calmly amidst red-hot ploughshares and escape burning. I believe, if some of you were thrown into Nebuchadnezzar's hottest furnace you would issue forth untraversed by the smell of fire.
Charlotte Bronte
#8. It does not astonish me that the critics in London relegate me to the lowest rank. Alas! I fear that they are only too justified!
Camille Pissarro
#9. The ... promptitude with which many painters, on arriving at an entirely new and unfamiliar place, settle down to work at once, never fails to astonish me: it seems indecent, like button-holing a complete stranger.
Augustus John
#10. The more I reflect on the graces I have received, the more they astonish me and make me tremble.
Rose Philippine Duchesne
#11. What continues to astonish me about a garden is that you can walk past it in a hurry, see something wrong, stop to set it right, and emerge an hour or two later breathless, contented, and wondering what on earth happened.
Dorothy Gilman
#12. Maggie Shipstead's prose is so graceful and muscular, so dazzling, so sure-handed and fearless, that at times I had to remind myself to breathe. Astonish Me is a treasure of small surprises.
Maria Semple
#13. It never fails to astonish me how cheaply a politician can be bought.
Timothy Noah
#14. I surround myself with women who inspire me to be more ambitious, and who constantly astonish me with their magnetism, style, and smarts.
Heidi Julavits
#15. It is an easy and vulgar thing to please the mob, and not a very arduous task to astonish them; but essentially to benefit and to improve them is a work fraught with difficulty, and teeming with danger.
Charles Caleb Colton
#16. If you give me a typewriter and I'm having a good day, I can write a scene that will astonish its readers. That will perhaps make them laugh, perhaps make them cry - that will have some emotional clout to it. It doesn't cost much to do that.
Alan Moore
#17. It is a mark of genius not to astonish but to be astonished.
Aubrey Menen
#18. And the next thing is that every war is going to astonish you in the way it occurred, and in the way it is carried out.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#19. One does not want glory accepted as a matter of course. One wants to shock and astonish people with it.
Diana Wynne Jones
#20. Deep within man dwell those slumbering powers; powers that would astonish him, that he never dreamed of possessing; forces that would revolutionize his life if aroused and put into action.
Orison Swett Marden
#22. The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the presence of certain divine laws. It perceives that this homely game of life we play, covers, under what seem foolish details, principles that astonish.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#23. When the artist ... intends from the beginning to be obscure and take obscurity as his objective or goal for its own sake and wishes to astonish, shock, and seem mysterious, that is a swindle.
Tawfiq Al-Hakim
#24. Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
Mark Twain
#25. It was never built for the comfort and happiness of its citizens, but to astonish the world.
Susan Ertz
#26. As if you're admiring your own psychology and are grasping at every tiny detail, in order to astonish the reader with your insensitivity which is not a part of you. What is this if not the proud challenge of a guilty man to his judge?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#27. Food had power. It could inspire, astonish, shock, excite, delight and impress. It had the power to please me ...
Anthony Bourdain
#28. Last days, last things, loom on: I write / to astonish myself. So much for all / plain speaking...
Geoffrey Hill
#29. I shall be up before you are awake; I shall be afield before you are up; and I shall have breakfasted before you are afield. In short, I shall astonish you all.
Thomas Hardy
#30. Liberty must be allowed to work out its natural results; and these will, ere long, astonish the world.
James Buchanan
#31. We wish to learn all the curious, outlandish ways of all the different countries, so that we can "show off" and astonish people when we get home. We wish to excite the envy of our untraveled friends with our strange foreign fashions which we can't shake off.
Mark Twain
#32. I sometimes astonish my patients by telling them that it is far more important that they should be able to lose themselves than that they should be able to find themselves. For it is only in losing oneself that one does find oneself.
Theodore Dalrymple
#33. I want to overhear passionate arguments about what we are and what we are doing and what we ought to do. I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another. I want to believe there are geniuses scheming to astonish the rest of us, just for the pleasure of it.
Marilynne Robinson
#34. The thing that is so singular and stunning about Macbeth - indeed, it strikes one straightaway - is that all the magic Shakespeare put into writing it manages so entirely to harrow and astonish the soul.
William Shakespeare
#35. I'd learned something ... Food had power. It could inspire, astonish, shock, excite, delight and impress. It had the power to please me ... and others. This was valuable information.
Anthony Bourdain
#36. Always do what's right; this will gratify some and astonish the rest
Albert Einstein
#37. The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.
Milan Kundera
#38. But round your image
there is no fog, and the Earth
can still astonish.
W. H. Auden
#39. Great things astonish us, and small dishearten us. Custom makes both familiar.
Jean De La Bruyere
#40. My good fellow," said Mesnil, stopping, "ever since the creation of the world there have been men like me specially intended to astonish men...men like you.
Jules Barbey D'Aurevilly
#41. The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us. When the world seems familiar, when one has got used to existence, one has become an adult.
Eugene Ionesco
#42. Take your light and take your love into the world as the only weapons that we need to make this world truly glorious, truly beautiful, and astonish all of life.
Hafsat Abiola
#43. The important thing in writing is the capacity to astonish. Not shock - shock is a worn-out word - but astonish.
Terry Southern
#44. When I reach the shades at last it will no doubt astonish Satan to discover, on thumbing my dossier, that I was a member of the Y.M.C.A.
H.L. Mencken
#45. Art doesn't want to be familiar. It wants to astonish us. Or, in some cases, to enrage us. It wants to move us. To touch us. Not accommodate us, make us comfortable.
Jamake Highwater
#46. My wish for you is that you continue. Continue to be who and how you are, to astonish a mean world with your acts of kindness. Continue to allow humor to lighten the burden of your tender heart.
Maya Angelou
#47. I want to do something splendid ... something heroic or wonderful that won't be forgotten after I'm dead. I don't know what, but I'm on the watch for it and mean to astonish you all someday.
Louisa May Alcott
#48. What do I ask of a painting? I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince.
Lucian Freud
#50. All television ever did was shrink the demand for ordinary movies. The demand for extraordinary movies increased. If any one thing is wrong with the movie industry today, it is the unrelenting effort to astonish.
Clive James
#52. In truth, the only restrictions on our capacity to astonish ourselves and each other are imposed by our own minds.
David Blaine
#53. Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble of men and books and institutions by a simple declaration of the divine fact. Bid the invaders take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here within.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#54. You don't have to know how to shine the sun, you just do it. Like you breathe. Now doesn't it just astonish you that you are this fantastically complex thing? And you are doing all of this and you never had any education in how to do it?
Allan Watts
#55. We can still astonish the gods in humanity
And be the stuff of future legends,
If we but dare to be real,
And have the courage to see
That this is the time to dream
The best dream of them all.
Ben Okri
#56. Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder; as if creation rose, bathed in the light, out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us.
Eugene Ionesco
#57. Overcoming sin, blessed though it surely is, is but the bare minimum of a believers experience. There is nothing astonishing in it. Not to overcome sin is what ought to astonish us.
Watchman Nee
#58. That no generally applicable law of the formulation and development of hybrids has yet been successfully formulated can hardly astonish anyone who is acquainted with the extent of the task and who can appreciate the difficulties with which experiments of this kind have to contend.
Gregor Mendel
#59. Be as proud of your race today as our as our fathers were in days of yore. We have beautiful history, and we shall create another in the future that will astonish the world.
Marcus Garvey
#60. In dreams it is often the case that the greatest extravagances seem bereft of their power to astonish and the most improbable chimeras seem commonplace.
Cormac McCarthy
#61. The spectacle of a great, solvent government paying a fictitious price for gold it did not want and did not need and doing it on purpose to debase the value of its own paper currency was one to astonish the world.
Garet Garrett
#62. For the sake of the sons - and even for the son's future wives - a woman must keep a part of her mind and heart entirely for herself. Every family is better off with a wife and mother who can astonish and occasionally dewilder.
Pam Brown
#63. Classifiable things reek of death. You must strike out in other spheres ... quit the ranks. That's the sign of masterpieces and heroes. An original, that's the person to astonish and to rule.
Jean Cocteau
#64. The intention (of the puja pandals) is not so much to entertain as to disorient and astonish; to tap into the Bengali's appetite for the bizarre, the uncanny.
Amit Chaudhuri
#65. It never failed to astonish him, then or ever, how much of the world around him was mysterious and hidden from view.
Lev Grossman
#66. It would astonish if not amuse the older citizens to learn that I (a strange, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working at ten dollars per month) have been put down as the candidate of pride, wealth, and aristocratic family distinction.
Abraham Lincoln
