“I just stood there staring, because while I've seen a lot of weird things, I hadn't ever seen that.”

Source: The Name of the Wind

Variant: Nico, I've seen a lot of brave things. But what you just did? That was maybe the bravest.
Source: The House of Hades

New Scientist interview (2004)
Context: There is nothing more to this than a simple iterative formula. It is so simple that most children can program their home computers to produce the Mandelbrot set. … Its astounding complication was completely out of proportion with what I was expecting. Here is the curious thing: the first night I saw the set, it was just wild. The second night, I became used to it. After a few nights, I became familiar with it. It was as if somehow I had seen it before. Of course I hadn't. No one had seen it. No one had described it. The fact that a certain aspect of its mathematical nature remains mysterious, despite hundreds of brilliant people working on it, is the icing on the cake to me.

Source: All the Light We Cannot See

Interview with Howard Stern

Source: Song Your Song

Decoding the West, from Sunday Best (1976)

Source: I Lived to Tell It All (1996, ebook 2014), Page 205.