Some Surprising Quotes

#1. My idea about collections is that you write as hard as you can for some period and what you're really doing during that time is hyper-focusing on the individual pieces - trying to make each one sit up and really do some surprising work.

George Saunders

#2. Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.

Adam Gopnik

#3. Those ... who insist that there are some moral limits that they will not violate, are forever surprising themselves.

David Simon

#4. Melrose is the finest remaining specimen of Gothic architecture in Scotland. Some of the sculptured flowers in the cloister arches are remarkably beautiful and delicate, and the two windows - the south and east oriels - are of a lightness and grace of execution really surprising.

Bayard Taylor

#5. I thought I might cry, the way you do when someone gives you some kindness when you most need it but when it seems the most surprising thing.

Deb Caletti

#6. I think of a lot of comedy being watched alone, for some reason. It's surprising to me that people are getting together to watch stand-up comedy.

Gary Gulman

#7. We find . . . in everyday life, where dilemmas are sometimes solved by the most surprising new propositions; many artists, philosophers, and even scientists owe some of their best ideas to inspirations . . . from the unconscious.

C. G. Jung

#8. As the sense of smell is so intimately connected with that of taste, it is not surprising that an excessively bad odour should excite wretching or vomitting in some persons.

Charles Darwin

#9. I still wish to contend that some metaphors enable us to see aspects of reality that the metaphor's production helps to constitute. But that is no longer surprising if one believes that the world is necessarily a world under a certain description - or a world seen from a certain perspective.

Max Black

#10. War has frightful beauties which we have not concealed; it has also, we acknowledge, some hideous features. One of the most surprising is the prompt stripping of the bodies of the dead after the victory. The dawn which follows a battle always rises on naked corpses.

Victor Hugo

#11. Vice President Biden's surprising declaration of unqualified support for gay marriage seems to have forced President Obama into a public endorsement of a controversial social issue. It is difficult not to suspect that Biden's pronouncement aimed to give the president some political cover.

Robert Dallek

#12. it is not surprising that some, such as the historian John R. Vile, suggest we consider the concession as a form of military surrender or even a funeral oration. Just as after a war, the public wants peace after a presidential campaign. They hope that politicians will emulate that most

Scott Farris

#13. My father has developed a tradition of surprising us at some point by appearing in fancy dress. He buys a new costume each year and typically gets carried away. A couple of Christmases ago he appeared in an inflatable sumo outfit. It's endearing, really, and only quite embarrassing.

Pippa Middleton

#14. Above the altar is suspended the horrifically detailed model of a dying man, who, like the stained-glass version of his mother during The Annunciation, is wearing an expression too serene for such surprising circumstance. Jesus looks like he's thinking, Well, here I am, nailed to some wood.

Mark Crutchfield

#15. I mean, it's not surprising, really. Once you love something, you always love it in some way. You have to. It's, like, part of you for good.

Sarah Dessen

#16. The concentration in my book on Marie Antoinette's childhood and on her family influences. It is surprising how some books actually start with her arrival in France!

Antonia Fraser

#17. I rarely come away from presenting the 'Today' programme without some sense of regret. There is always some question that I should have asked, or some point that I should have made. This is annoying but not surprising. Perfection is hard to achieve in a three-hour live programme.

Evan Davis

#18. A great advantage of X-ray analysis as a method of chemical structure analysis is its power to show some totally unexpected and surprising structure with, at the same time, complete certainty.

Dorothy Hodgkin

#19. After appearing for eight seasons as a beloved character on 'Supernatural,' it's not surprising that I get most of my recognition on the street from that, and it happens with some frequency. But I'm not a guy who gets recognized often.

Jim Beaver

#20. After some cogitation, it is difficult not to agree with Herman Bondi (1919 - 2005), who in his book 'Relativity and Common Sense' says:
... The surprising thing, surely, is that molecules in a gas behave so much as billiard balls, not that electrons behave so little like billiard balls.

Felix Alba-Juez

#21. Some of the pictures in 'The Human Face of Big Data' will bring tears to your eyes; others are so surprising or memorable that you just have to show them to your friends and family.

Rick Smolan

#22. The more the climate is forced to change, the more likely it is to hit some unforeseen threshold that can trigger quite fast, surprising and perhaps unpleasant changes.

Richard Alley

#23. In fact, the very nature of an X-event is that it is both rare and surprising. So I would not say that any specific X-event is likely. What I would say, though, is that some X-event is not only plausible, but very likely in a time scale of a few years.

John L. Casti

#24. One of the surprising things I hadn't expected when I decided to write crime fiction is how much you are expected to be out in front of the public. Some writers aren't comfortable with that. I don't have a problem with that.

Kathy Reichs

#25. Beautiful. Jules once thought he'd understood what the word meant. He now believed it overused. Some word needed to be kept in reserve for the rare, the arresting, the surprising ... the magical. Or a new one invented.

Julie Anne Long

#26. What interests me is the surprising enormous extent to which most people accept the fate that's been given to them, and find some dignity.

Kazuo Ishiguro

#27. A surprising feature of herbal research is that it is seldom the rare, exotic, and beautiful plant that proves the most interesting; more often it is some common, familiar, and despised weed that is discovered to have undreamed-of virtues.

Euell Gibbons

#28. He wore his medals. He had a surprising number of them, the real kind, not the ones you got for turning up. Although turning up was no mean thing, some days.

Nick Harkaway

#29. I come from a very expressive family, so it's really not surprising that we became actors. There was a lot of real-life drama in our house. Some of it was drama, some of it was comedy and some of it was comic-tragedy.

John Turturro

#30. Remembering her own narrow single bed at home, she added without thinking, "Someone could get lost in that bed."

Valois laughed, surprising Delta and she looked curiously at him. His eyes twinkling wickedly, the Frenchman said, "Perhaps some company would relieve you of that fear.

Brooke Templar

#31. It is a little surprising given the strength of the economy that there is a perception - at least among some of the public - that the economy is not very good.

Edward Lazear

#32. Don't show off every day, or you'll stop surprising people. There must always be some novelty left over. The person who displays a little more of it each day keeps up expectations, and no one ever discovers the limits of his talent.

Baltasar Gracian

#33. It's not surprising to see in my own work, looking back, and in the work of some of my peers, an attention to family. It's nice to write a book that does tend toward significance and meaning, and where else are you sure of finding it?

Jonathan Franzen

#34. I had a mother I could only seem to please with verbal accomplishments of some sort or another. She read constantly, so I read constantly. If I used words that might have seemed surprising at a young age, she would recognize that and it would please her.

Amy Hempel

#35. It's the stupid questions that have some of the most surprising and interesting answers. Most people never think to ask the stupid questions.

Cory Doctorow

#36. So it's possible that someday, by understanding a little bit more about how the world works, it will come back to help us in some other way that will be surprising.

Saul Perlmutter

#37. I was as hurt by this as if I were engaged in some honest occupation. There is nothing surprising about this. Human beings feel dishonor the most, sometimes, when they most deserve it.

Charles Neider

#38. Considering the length of time that women have been dependent, is it surprising that some of them hug their chains, and fawn like the spaniel?

Mary Wollstonecraft

#39. So also in culture. Infinite players understand that the vigor of a culture has to do with the variety of its sources, the differences within itself. The unique and the surprising are not suppressed in some persons for the strength of others. The genius in you stimulates the genius in me.

James P. Carse

#40. With sixty professors there are roughly eighteen hundred pairs of professors. Out of that many pairs it was not surprising that there were some whose members did not like one another.

Stanislaw Ulam

#41. In science, each new result, sometimes quite surprising, heralds a step forward and allows one to discard some hypotheses, even though one or two of these might have been highly favored.

Stanley B. Prusiner

#42. Time is like an enterprising manager always bent on staging some new and surprising production, without knowing very well what it will be.

George Santayana

#43. That was clearly surprising, interesting - a very interesting milestone was when you can pick up a magazine and read an article about some sort of computer related thing and they mention the word internet without explaining it.

Jon Postel