Life Can Surprise You Quotes

#1. The joy of living, its beauty, is all bound up in the fact that life can surprise you.

Frank Herbert

#2. We do not always get what we want. Sometimes life presents us with surprises.

Michael Scott

#3. To have attracted readers is the most magical part of my writing life. I was not expecting you to show up when I wrote my first books. It took me by surprise. It filled me with gratitude. It still does.

Pat Conroy

#4. I remembered a few things about waking. I remembered the sense of surprise as dream life and waking life swapped primacy, and the way in which the most tangible and deeply involving dreams could bleach entirely away.

Alex Garland

#5. Harper Lee was legendarily private. I've never known such a private woman in my life. It's no surprise that she left Monroeville, a gossipy little southern town where everybody wants to know everybody's business, and went to the most anonymous city in America.

Wayne Flynt

#6. They say that our sense of smell is one of the strongest triggers of memories. Of course, our sense of smell is integral to our sense of taste, so it is no surprise, then, that in a life full of moving and traveling, food has always been a source of familiar comfort for me.

Philippe Cousteau Jr.

#7. Does my sexiness upset you? Does it come as a surprise That I dance like I've got diamonds At the meeting of my thighs?

Maya Angelou

#8. Nor has his death the world deceiv'd than his wondrous life surprise d; if he like a madman liv'd least he like a wise one dy'd.

Miguel De Cervantes

#9. The routine helped the healing process. It gave me structure. It eliminated any sense of surprise, which at that point, I really didn't want anymore surprises in my life. Routine gave me the foundation for creat- ing a healthier life.

Sharon E. Rainey

#10. When you look back on your life, it looks as though it were a plot, but when you are into it, it's a mess: just one surprise after another. Then, later, you see it was perfect.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#11. What we write should surprise us, the way life surprises us.

Marty Rubin

#12. Each death and departure comes to us as a surprise, a sorrow never anticipated. Life is a long series of farewells; only the circumstances should surprise us.

Jessamyn West

#13. If you are open to change and welcome surprise, you know the secret of creativity and the secret of life.

Chloe Thurlow

#14. What surprises me most in architecture, as in other techniques, is that a project has one life in its built state but another in its written or drawn state.

Aldo Rossi

#15. Being born again from above is an enduring, perpetual, and eternal beginning. It provides a freshness all the time in thinking, talking, and living - a continual surprise of the life of God. Staleness is an indication that something in our lives is out of step with God.

Oswald Chambers

#16. I don't tell everyone my life history because if everyone knows your inside-leg measurement, how can you surprise them?

Penelope Wilton

#17. Step into my shoes follow my journey my mountains my valleys my surprise potholes and if you can keep going the way I keep going perhaps you'll understand my choices & strength.

Karen Salmansohn

#18. So remember those who win the game
Lose the love they sought to gain
In debitures of quality and dubious integrity
Their small-town eyes will gape at you
In dull surprise when payment due
Exceeds accounts received at seventeen

Janis Ian

#19. Don't plan it all. Let life surprise you a little.

Julia Alvarez

#20. I realized that once people are broken in certain ways they can't ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one.

Douglas Coupland

#21. If you over-plot your book you strangle your characters. Your characters have to have enough freedom and life to be able to surprise you.

Alan Lightman

#22. It's funny how even when you've lived with someone your whole life, they can still surprise you.

Shannon Wiersbitzky

#23. Faith in God - life can never take you by surprise again.

James Dobson

#24. Education does loads of things for girls that won't surprise you at all - it provides self-esteem, teaches important life skills, and offers the kinds of choices a good education can give anyone.

Richard E. Robbins

#25. For under scrutiny you will find that even an open book can have a surprise scribbled in its margins.

Violet Haberdasher

#26. Sometimes life can be unexpected. Sometimes things surprise you and all you can do is roll with the punches or let them beat you to a bloody pulp. -Sage Hannigan, Contingency

P.S. Martinez

#27. A study last year showed that the page you turn to first in the newspaper can be a predictor of how long you will live. No surprise, turning first to the Comics Pages prolongs your life.

Elayne Boosler

#28. I suppose it's nice to have some surprise in life and to surprise yourself in life and see what else you can do.

Paul Weller

#29. The whole business was like a child's toy that you could buy at the dime store, all built in this wonderful way that you could explain in Life magazine so that really a five-year-old can understand what's going on ... This was the greatest surprise for everyone.

Max Delbruck

#30. Beth sighed. "I want a relationship, but then again ... I don't." To her surprise, Grandfather cackled. "That's quite normal, my girl. Quite normal indeed. There are no guarantees in this life. You have to take what you can get and enjoy it while you have it.

Karen Hawkins

#31. He felt sorry for me. He wanted a plain country woman and that's what he married, and then he held it against me the rest of my life like I was supposed to change and surprise him somehow.

Marsha Norman

#32. Every goodbye calls for preparation, but most times, life takes us by surprise.

Elisabetta Gnone

#33. Life has a way of turning around and surprising you!

Anuranjita Kumar

#34. Bob Marley performed the 'One Love Peace' concert in Jamaica with the two different warring political sides. There's always been that in black music and culture in general. It's no surprise because black music is such a reflection of what's going on in black life. It's not unusual for hip-hop.

Mos Def

#35. Only gratefulness, in the form of limitless openness for surprise, lays hold of the fullness of life in hope.

David Steindl-Rast

#36. Motherhood is the thing in a woman's life that catches her by total and complete surprise.

Melanie Shankle

#37. Spirituality is a mixed-up, topsy-turvy, helter-skelter godliness that turns our lives into an upside-down toboggan ride of unexpected turns, surprise bumps and bone shattering crashes ... a life ruined by a Jesus who loves us right into his arms.

Mike Yaconelli

#38. And this should not surprise us. The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#39. Some people experience rare moments when everything they believe is challenged. Or at least shaken up. Those moments stay with them. Surprise, real surprise, is an exotic thing not soon forgotten.

Gregory Miller

#40. There's a version of the future in my head where I stay here forever....Bleak, I know. But, still, there's a lot of comfort that comes with knowing how your life is going to turn out. I've never had a surprise turn out in my favor.

Julie Murphy

#41. Because from what I've seen of marriages and relationships, there aren't any rules. You deal with what comes, like anything else in life. There's no template. No freaking outline. And that's what makes relationships interesting, right? The element of surprise.

Kristin Walker

#42. The most pleasant surprise is to get lost in the beauty of life.

Debasish Mridha

#43. In life the only thing that you can expect is the unexpected; the only surprise is a day that has none.

Joan Rivers

#44. Lord, catch me off guard today. Surprise me with some moment of beauty or pain so that at least for the moment, I may be startled into seeing that you are here in all your splendor, always and everywhere, barely hidden, beneath, beyond, within this life I breathe.

Frederick Buechner

#45. It's the great surprise of my life that I ended up loving [my father] so much.

Pat Conroy

#46. Life rarely develops as we expect. People surprise us, sometimes in unpleasant ways. They don't always react as we hope they will or want them to.

A.A. Aguirre

#47. How ridiculous and how strange to be surprised at anything which happens in life

Marcus Aurelius

#48. Live your life as if you are ready to say goodbye to it at any moment, as if the time left for you were some pleasant surprise.

Marcus Aurelius

#49. To my surprise, the more I searched about Qi Xiangfu, the more I found of a life lived partly online. He once wrote a short memoir in which he described himself in the third person, with the formality usually reserved for China's most famous writers.

Evan Osnos

#50. Everyone who makes a mistake knows in advance that he's going to make a mistake, he simply can't stop himself. The surprise is perhaps a reaction to the size of the mistake, not the fact of its existence.

Zeruya Shalev

#51. It should surprise no one that modern soldiers return home just as conflicted and detached as previous generations. The difference is that in the age of vapid American decadence, their simpler fundamental values are largely irrelevant to we civilians.

Tiffany Madison

#52. Adults who still derive childlike pleasure from hanging gifts of a ready-made education on the Christmas tree of a child waiting outside the door to life do not realize how unreceptive they are making the children to everything that constitutes the true surprise of life.

Karl Kraus

#53. The greatest surprise in life to me is the brevity of life.

Billy Graham

#54. Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.

Boris Pasternak

#55. And yet, you never knew wwhat you were capable of until you arrived at that given moment. Life was just a whole string of spots where you continued to surprise yourself.

Jodi Picoult

#56. No matter how much you try to maintain order in your life, no matter how careful you are to guard against mistakes, against imperfections, there is always some smudge, some flaw, lurking out of sight. Waiting to surprise you.

Tess Gerritsen

#57. Do not plant a weed and pretend surprise when it grows to strangle your garden. For, I tell you that to hate is to kill for from hatred grows death as surely as life grows from love.

Michael Grant

#58. Extreme patience and persistence are required,
Yet everybody succeeds at this before being handed
The surprise box lunch of the rest of his life.

John Ashbery