“The important thing in writing is the capacity to astonish. Not shock—shock is a worn-out word—but astonish.”

— Terry Southern

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Terry Southern 1

American author 1924–1995

Shana Alexander (1925–2005) Journalist

The Feminine Eye (1970), p. 169

“One does not want glory accepted as a matter of course. One wants to shock and astonish people with it.”

Diana Wynne Jones book Power of Three

Source: Power of Three (1976), p. 9.

“I write
to astonish myself”

Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016) English poet and professor

The Orchards of Syon XXIII.20-21.
Poetry

“The human capacity for denial and rationalization is always shocking, but never surprising.”

David H. Levy (1948) Canadian astronomer

Humor in Psychotherapy (2007)

“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.”

Eugéne Ionesco (1909–1994) Romanian playwright

“The astonishing thing about Einstein's equations is that they appear to have come out of nothing.”

Ernest Barnes (1874–1953) English mathematician and clergyman

As quoted by Gerald James Whitrow, The Structure of the Universe: An Introduction to Cosmology (1949)

“What an astonishing thing a book is.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

42 min 33 sec
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), The Persistence of Memory [Episode 11]
Context: What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.