I Surprise Myself Quotes

#1. I surprise myself that I'm not dead in the gutter somewhere, surprised that I haven't given up.

Miguel Syjuco

#2. Sometimes I surprise myself with how dissatisfied I am with seemingly satisfying experiences.

Ezra Koenig

#3. I wake up every morning and I surprise myself. I wake up to a new me.

Gina Carano

#4. Humor's always been the problem of my work, hasn't it? When working, I feel satisfied when I surprise myself. And when I surprise myself, I wind up laughing.

Kara Walker

#5. I'm always imposing my taste in books on others. I hope that people enjoy being surprised by a book they might not otherwise read - I enjoy the surprise myself when others do this to me.

Mary Roach

#6. I must admit it's a surprise to find myself still here, still talking to you. I prefer to think of it as talking, although of course it isn't: I'm saying nothing, you're hearing nothing. The only thing between us is this black line: a thread thrown onto the empty page, into the empty air.

Margaret Atwood

#7. Was he real?" I mumble, staring at the phone in my hand. I didn't buy this for myself, did I? "What?" Livie asks, looking up at me in surprise. "Trent, was he real? I mean, I could understand if he wasn't real. Who could be that beautiful and sweet and perfect and want someone as fucked up as me?

K.A. Tucker

#8. Every time I write something, I think, this is the most offensive thing I will ever write. But no. I always surprise myself.

Chuck Palahniuk

#9. What guides me is to do work that's more avant-garde - things that I think are special. You can easily become a celebrity and get caught up in all that blur. I just want to work and surprise myself.

Adrien Brody

#10. One day I looked at something in myself that I had been avoiding because it was too painful. Yet once I did, I had an unexpected surprise. Rather than self-hatred, I was flooded with compassion for myself because I realized the pain necessary to develop that coping mechanism to begin with.

Marianne Williamson

#11. I often surprise myself. You can't plan some shots that go in, not unless you're on marijuana, and the only grass I'm partial to is Wimbledon's.

Rod Laver

#12. When I first started, I saw myself shooting documentaries or making documentaries, which is what I did, mostly, for a number of years. So it was quite a surprise how I found myself shooting features. It was like my wildest dreams as a kid collided.

Roger Deakins

#13. I follow these intimate connections of strangers and, surprise!, end up finding even myself in the work at some point.

Aleksandra Mir

#14. It almost takes people by surprise when I'm not a big talker. Because I'm known as being sort of a loud mouth. I have a lot to say. But I try to be more thoughtful with my comments or reactions, unless it's something witty or hysterical that I just can't keep myself from blurting or tweeting!

Natalie Maines

#15. '21 Jump Street' is great. I just made that, and produced it and was a writer on it. It's starring myself and Channing Tatum, and maybe some surprise guests.

Jonah Hill

#16. I don't think I'd ever get any better as a poet if I didn't push myself, very deliberately, to grow. My best poems surprise me, as they should, but I fight them at every turn, possibly just because I'm stubborn.

James Arthur

#17. I basically expect anything. Isn't that wild? I used to surprise myself a lot: certain moves, how I'd get out of trouble. But at some point, you accept the talent that you have, you accept your creativity.

Michael Jordan

#18. Logan's gaze swung back to Galen. His eyes crinkled in the corners and a genuine smile appeared. "Did you just make a jest? Galen Shaw, you surprise me." "I have to do something to save myself from Hayden.

Donna Grant

#19. I am surprising myself [at] each show, and the delivered piano often surprises me. Sometimes the piano is so old that I don't have to prepare it, and sometimes I have a concert grand!

Volker Bertelmann

#20. I like to do new things, so I always take on roles that I feel will keep me on my toes. I never want to pigeon myself, so I always like to surprise myself. I believe in versatility and so I would play anything as long as it was a challenge.

Archie Panjabi

#21. I thought I would teach my students a thing or two from the text books once I got a job in school but to my surprise my students teach me things about life and myself every single day.

Kavita Bhupta Ghosh

#22. I always want to surprise myself, more than anybody else.

Kellin Quinn

#23. I didn't picture myself as a movie actress. I began to think about it around college. I remember thinking, 'Well somebody has to be in them,' so maybe I could do that eventually. It's all been a surprise.

Annette Bening

#24. I just want to keep trying to surprise myself and I want to keep challenging myself.

Jennifer Aniston

#25. To my surprise, it was a place where my thoughts were the most lucid. I wasn't bogged down in random trivial details or the luxury of time-consuming over-analysis. This place forced you to live because at any moment, life could be lost. Ramadi forced me to die unto myself.

M.B. Dallocchio

#26. With solos, I don't like to be too prepared going in - I like to surprise myself.

Alex Lifeson

#27. I find mirrors detestable; I dislike seeing myself. Of course, there's a mirror in the bathroom, but it's a magnifying one for shaving. Photographs are fine, but I don't like mirrors because they take you by surprise.

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt

#28. I guess I didn't have a lot of friends, so that's what made videogames so important. They played back. I could do them myself. Solitaire can't surprise you; there's no AI. But videogames play back with you.

Tim Schafer

#29. I find myself eating different kinds of chicken each and every day, even if it's by surprise.

Ludacris

#30. About myself I have no great illusions. I know what I am. I know what I'm good at. I know what I ain't. I'm always hoping to surprise myself. But I do have a love of music and I do love to communicate it, and that's the best I can do, really. And I can raise a good family, too.

Keith Richards

#31. I'm a strange person. Sometimes I hardly know what I'm going to do or say next. Sometimes I seem a stranger to myself. Sometimes what I do surprises me and I can't understand why I do it.

Philip K. Dick

#32. I'm supposed to spread my fingers as wide as they were with the rubber band, mash my palms hard into the floor, and pull myself down. When I do, I surprise even myself when my elbows straighten with barely any effort.

Christopher McDougall

#33. Much to my surprise, as I set them free, I was able to forgive myself for the judgments I had made about them. I now hold them in a loving space in my heart and honor them as my ancestors who love me and guide me each day.

Iyanla Vanzant

#34. I write intuitively, and with most of my plays, I don't know what is always going to happen. This means I can sometimes go off on a wrong tangent, and with luck then rewrite it in a better direction. But it means I sometimes surprise myself as I'm going along.

Christopher Durang

#35. I always surprise myself with my voice. A lot of people don't get it, and they're like, 'You can't sing. Stop. What are you doing?' And it's funny to hear a lot people say I sing in falsetto because it's not falsetto - that's my voice.

Shamir

#36. I could feel myself begin to recede, to tip and lose balance, slide toward the deeper darkness that had crept in from outside. It happened so quickly and took me by surprise; sometimes I just turned around and found it there-ah, camarade-unaware it had been waiting for me for days.

Bryan Mealer

#37. You're stifling me brother! Can I not have a moment to myself? I swear it wouldn't surprise me to find you sitting atop me one day as I do my morning business in the privy, like some great mother hen!" Elf

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#38. It never ceases to surprise me, the people I get to work with. I'm in a French film with Sandrine Bonnaire? I adore Sandrine Bonnaire. I'm doing a picture for Robert Redford? The Sundance Kid? I have to pinch myself sometimes.

Kevin Kline

#39. I always try to be different. I always want to surprise myself.

Quentin Dupieux

#40. I always try to put myself in the way of surprise as much as possible. My ambition is to keep challenging myself. I like that journey of discovery.

David Morrissey

#41. Maybe I have always been, as Vi would subsequently accuse me, someone who creates obstacles for myself than looks around in surprise, wondering where they came from.

Curtis Sittenfeld

#42. Buying my wife a gun sort of like me saying, ' You know, I kinda want to kill myself, but I want it to be a surprise'.

Marc Maron

#43. What I try to do as an actor is constantly find that, find ways to risk, find opportunities to fall on my face if it's going to be worth it, and then maybe I'll surprise myself.

Jeremy Irons

#44. 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

#45. She left the window - and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps - and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer - and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words failed me to express), The lady is ugly!

Wilkie Collins

#46. The inspiration for my novels comes from the depths of a creative well, based on asking myself questions over and over. I try to write something different each time I sit down to write; I try to surprise the readers.

Nicholas Sparks

#47. I like to surprise myself. I've always been attracted to projects where I don't know how they're going to turn out.

Terrence McNally

#48. The longer I've been doing this, the more I've realized that you have no idea what kinds of roles are possible for you - dream roles can take you by surprise. That being said, I need to play Hamlet one day. I'd also love to be in a play that I have written myself.

Jake Epstein

#49. I guess I just always want to surprise myself and say something that I'm not really quite sure where it came from, and it sort of makes sense and has a kind of profundity to it. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't.

David Shrigley

#50. Surprise is a major factor in distinguishing an answer to prayer from a projection of my own mental processes. When I can't believe I made up the answer myself, I have to look around to see where it came from.

Pat Schneider

#51. You gave me back the paradise
That I thought I lost for good
You helped me find the reasons why
It took me by surprise that you understood
You knew all along
What I never wanted to say
Until I learned to love myself
I was never ever lovin' anybody else.

Madonna

#52. I was in Britain that year [1963] and some music publishing people in Denmark Street in London suggested me to the BBC. So I found myself in front of a British television show, which was a nice surprise.

Gordon Lightfoot

#53. Bearings

You are my dear compass,
who knows no way but true,
so when I'm lost and drifting,
I find myself in you.

Yet when I ask you, fearful,
if I should set you free,
imagine my surprise to hear
you take your north from me.

Louise Hawes

#54. When I was in college, at Wheaton-I inadvertently got cast in a play, and I had a really great time doing it. I didnt know I had any knack for it, but I really enjoyed myself. It was a complete surprise.

Catherine Keener

#55. Doesn't surprise me that Christ our Lord
preferred to live with whores
& sinners, seeing
I go in for that myself.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#56. I didn't particularly feel like explaining myself to eighteen bewildered people.

Shannon A. Thompson

#57. I watch his lips moving and he doesn't seem to notice that I'm about to reach up, unzip myself from the skull down, jump out of my skin, and yell, Surprise! There's a crazy person in here!

Colleen Clayton