Surprising Things Quotes

#1. You can analyse a joke and say it's funny because this guy thought this was going to happen, and that happened, and it's surprising. But not all surprising things are funny.

John Lloyd

#2. 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

#3. Writing a story requires you to understand how the world works, how characters think, how their emotions drive them to do surprising things, and so on. In other words, as a writer, you have to be more than a stylist. You need to learn to become a master of storytelling.

David Farland

#4. Whenever unexamined outlooks come to the surface, surprising things can happen.

Barnet Bain

#5. The archaeology of grief is not ordered. It is more like earth under a spade, turning up things you had forgotten. Surprising things come to light: not simply memories, but states of mind, emotions, older ways of seeing the world.

Helen Macdonald

#6. In this dark world where he now dwelt, ugly things and surprising things and once in a long while a tiny wondrous thing spilled out at him constantly; he could count on nothing.

Philip K. Dick

#7. One of the surprising things that Brezhnev said when we were in our talks, was - when I proposed that we make these changes in nuclear weaponry, he said, "God will never forgive us if we don't succeed." And, you know, coming from the leader of an atheistic communist country, this surprised everyone.

Jimmy Carter

#8. One thing George R. R. Martin does is surprising things to main characters. But he says so himself.

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau

#9. True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.

Jean Cocteau

#10. You see so many surprising things and you think they're obvious.

Courtney Milan

#11. You find surprising things about the privite life of a country when you invide it

Evan Wright

#12. The main necessity on both sides of a revolution is kindness, which makes possible the most surprising things. To treat one's neighbor as oneself is the fundamental maxim for revolution.

Freya Stark

#13. Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.

Jean Cocteau

#14. Therapy isn't Radio.We don't need to constantly fill the air with sounds. Sometimes, when its quite, surprising things happen.

Mary Pipher

#15. Much more surprising things can happen to anyone who, when a disagreeable or discouraged thought comes into his mind, just has the sense to remember in time and push it out by putting in an agreeable, determinedly courageous one. Two things cannot be in one place.

Frances Hodgson Burnett

#16. Sometimes the most surprising things happen from our mistakes.

Coleen Patrick

#17. Clyde had a theory that women had a book, a homemade, photocopied three-ring binder called "Surprising Things to Do in a Relationship," which they passed around to one another, adding pages from time to time, hiding it under the bed. He figured that Desiree could run home tonight and add a new page.

Neal Stephenson

#18. One of the surprising things in this world is the respect a worthless man has for himself.

E.W. Howe

#19. One of the most surprising things in life is the sudden realization that one has become old

Leon Trotsky

#20. Desperation can make a person do surprising things.

Veronica Roth

#21. Let the novelists fret about consistency - story writers should feel free to jam; to get things right in new, surprising ways by allowing themselves, now and then, to get things wrong.

Walter Kirn

#22. The most impersonal seeming audiences eventually just say such intimate, smart, wise, amazing, totally surprising, funny things. It's empowering, in the sense of feeling like you're a part of something really important.

Gloria Steinem

#23. It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.

Barbara Kingsolver

#24. I'm learning so much, I'm surprising myself everyday with the things that are happening, the rhythms. I'm very happy and very excited.

Kate Del Castillo

#25. It is hardly surprising that there are more things in heaven and earth, dear reader, than have been dreamed of in our philosophy - or in our physics.

Carlo Rovelli

#26. I've always been interested in animal behavior, and I keep reading about it because it's so surprising all the time - so many things are happening around us that we neglect to look at. Part of the passion I have for biology is based on this wonderment.

Isabella Rossellini

#27. Photography makes one conscious of beauty everywhere, even in the simplest things, even in what is often considered commonplace or ugly. Yet nothing is really 'ordinary', for every fragment of the world is crowned with wonder and mystery, and a great and surprising beauty.

Alvin Langdon Coburn

#28. Surprising and interesting things happen to those who keep their eyes and their minds open and alert!

John Templeton

#29. I'm first and foremost a company man, surprising as that is. I love Warner Brothers. That's where I have a deal. That's where I've been for years. So I don't really interact too much with other studios and do things with other studios and I don't necessarily read scripts from other studios.

Todd Phillips

#30. As with many other things, there is a surprising amount of prejudice against quality control, but the proof of the pudding is still in the eating.

Kaoru Ishikawa

#31. Victor claims these kinds of things don't go on in normal households, but I'm pretty sure this entire incident could be blamed on the fact that I have several real-life sleep disorders. This is not too surprising considering I collect neurological disorders like other people collect comic books.

Jenny Lawson

#32. It's not surprising so many people end up with credit-card debts. Saving for your retirement and buying a house are difficult things, and we don't educate people about them at all.

Niall Ferguson

#33. And this was the surprising thing about life on Berk. It was a bit like the sea itself. One minute it was all storms, and shipwrecks, and desperate escapes from deadly dragons, the next it was as calm, and peacefully restful, as if these things had never happened.

Cressida Cowell

#34. Few things in life are as surprising as having your husband, the man you gave your heart and soul to, throw you off a 350-foot building. I should know.

Darynda Jones

#35. But the Spirit was not limited to doing surprising and extraordinary things. He was present in the Old Testament period in giving civil rule and government ... moral virtues ... physical strength ... and intellectual abilities.

John Owen

#36. I can honestly say that probably 95% of the things I was afraid of, it turned out I had no reason to be. So drop fear by the wayside. Just ... let it go. Then make way for a surprising tomorrow.

Neale Donald Walsch

#37. When filled with God's love, we can do and see and understand things that we could not otherwise do or see or understand. Filled with His love, we can endure pain, quell fear, forgive freely, avoid contention, renew strength, and bless and help others in ways surprising even to us.

John H. Groberg

#38. From the moment you say 'action,' this is the fun part - things should happen that surprise you, excite you, scare you, turn you on, make you laugh. If things aren't surprising you, when you say 'cut,' whisper things to the actors that will make them do things that do surprise you.

Jill Soloway

#39. The light, the sky, the water, they were all things you looked *through* during the day. At night, they were things you looked *into*. You looked *into* the stars, you looked *into* dark rollers and the surprising platinum flash of their caps.

Adam Johnson

#40. It was very hard to make 'Funny Face' in Paris because making movies is difficult and making a movie in a city that was glorious, that was unique and surprising, to get it, to put it on film you have to make choices and reject a lot of things so you're always wondering: 'Am I doing it right?'

Stanley Donen

#41. But we must not underestimate the potency of the mathematical process of abstraction. A surprising variety of things happen to have both magnitude and direction and to combine according to the parallelogram law; and many of them are not at all reminiscent of journeys.

Banesh Hoffmann

#42. It was surprising that you could spend hours in the middle of the night pretending things were okay, and know in thirty seconds of daylight that simply wasn't so

Gillian Flynn

#43. Baba Ayub didn't understand. Just as he didn't understand why a wave of something, something like the tail end of a sad dream, always swept through him whenever he heard the jingling, surprising him each time like an unexpected gust of wind. But then it passed, as all things do. It passed.

Khaled Hosseini

#44. I often find things at thrift stores and library sales that I never could have been looking for. In those cases, the research is done after the fact to figure out what, exactly, I've found. It's surprising how much out there still has no online presence.

Michael Dumontier

#45. What scientists are attached to is journeys into the unknown and discovering things that are completely unexpected and baffling and surprising.

Brian Cox

#46. It is really surprising how many and what pleasant things happen to me; perhaps it is because I am always ready to meet an agreeable situation a little more than halfway.

A. Edward Newton

#47. Over time, the welfare state has become dysfunctional in a surprising way. But in a way it became a victim of its own success: It became so successful at prolonging life, that it becomes financially unsustainable, unless you make major changes to things like retirement ages.

Niall Ferguson

#48. I can get really obsessive. I like writing many drafts, and I try not to because it is very time-consuming, especially when you're working on a novel. But I do like to take a story and reorder it, put things in different places. This allows me to see things in a new and sometimes surprising way.

Carol Windley

#49. Write down the things you wish to remember, and keep those records close. Secured. It's surprising how much you forget as the years go on.

Chloe Neill

#50. For me, even if I'm not a fan of the band in general or maybe it's not the style of music I want to put on for my daughter and me when we're waking up in the morning, there's always something that I can learn from it. And I think those are the things that are surprising.

Jon Foreman

#51. It's ever surprising, the things that don't change.

Maggie Stiefvater

#52. If you want a machine to be able to interact with people, it better not do things that are surprising to people.

Rodney Brooks

#53. If the world seems unfair or beyond our understanding, sublime places suggest that it is not surprising that things should be thus. We are the playthings of the forces that laid out the oceans and chiselled the mountains.

Alain De Botton

#54. To see things in surprising ways, you have to extend yourself a bit.

Elizabeth Hickey

#55. It's the writer's job to stage confrontations, so the characters will say surprising and revealing things, and educate and entertain us all.

Kurt Vonnegut

#56. Just as producers often give consumers things they want but didn't think to ask for, consumers sometimes come up with surprising uses for new inventions. When a new product appears, it can uncover dissatisfactions and desires no one knew were there.

Virginia Postrel

#57. One of the things I admire about longer stories is the way writers can work with dead time and slower, more idle moments - not only can they feel expansive, they feel lived-in; the unhurried pacing often makes the endings even more resonant and surprising for me.

Molly Antopol

#58. This naming of things is so crucial to possession - a spiritual padlock with the key thrown irretrievably away - that it is a murder, an erasing, and it is not surprising that when people have felt themselves prey to it (conquest), among their first acts of liberation is to change their names ...

Jamaica Kincaid

#59. If I'm in a relationship, I'm 1,000% in it. I love doing things for them and surprising them. And that's just something I thoroughly enjoy and it gives me a lot of pleasure. I just haven't found that right girl yet.

Josh Henderson

#60. People often find it surprising that actors find photo shoots difficult, because you're very concerned about what's going on externally in those things when you have to be concerned with what's going on internally as an actor.

Max Irons

#61. I've always had a fascination for everything surrounding things that are unexplainable. Not surprising that my first movie was a horror film, even though, of course, at the time I had no experience writing horror music.

Christopher Young

#62. It's indeed surprising that replacing the elementary particle with a string leads to such a big change in things. I'm tempted to say that it has to do with the fuzziness it introduces.

Edward Witten

#63. I couldn't have foreseen all the good things that have followed my mother's death. The renewed energy, the surprising sweetness of grief. The tenderness I feel for strangers on walkers. The deeper love I have for my siblings and friends. The desire to play the mandolin. The gift of a visitation.

Mary Schmich

#64. Sometimes reactions can be quite surprising: readers like things that you, the author, feel you've barely gotten away with; or they dislike one of the parts you secretly think is one of your little gems.

Margaret Atwood

#65. I like to do things that are surprising and different.

Rudy Rucker

#66. I think it's the sentence-to-sentence pleasures, the little surprises of a surprising style of an acute style, and also the way things happen one after the other, that makes a book interesting to read page to page

John Updike

#67. I prefer ugly things. I prefer things which are surprising.

Dries Van Noten

#68. I'm not saying there's not darkness in there still, but it's happening from outward factors more than inward. Maybe things are terrifying, but they're beautiful, too. The world is extremely surprising.

Gary Lightbody