Quotes about surprise

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“If you plan for the worst, all surprises are pleasant.”

“If you love something set it free, but don't be surprised if it comes back with herpes.”

“Comfort and familiarity were wonderful but they also dulled passion and excitement. Predictability and habit made surprises almost impossible.”

“You're much shorter than my mom."
"Brat," she said, surprised into a giggle.
"That's no way to talk to a vampire."
"Bloodsucking brat."
"Better" he said.”

“Sometimes people surprise us. People we believe we know.”

“In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The 'anything whatever' then becomes the sophisticated acme of value.”

“i am like a survivor
of the flood
walking through the streets
drenched with
God
surprised that all of the
drowned victims
are still walking and talking”

“You are an endless project… changing, evolving, surprising.”

“That should have been my strategy! By the time I’ve worked through the emotions of surprise, admiration, anger, jealousy, and frustration, I’m watching that reddish mane of hair disappear into the trees well out of shooting range.”

“Retribution is tricky…. The insult isn't usually worth the risk of punishment. And eventually one learns that karma has a surprising way of taking care of these situations. All you have to do is sit back and watch.”

“Personally, I think knees should be kept for the eighth or ninth date, or the wedding day. As a nice surprise you know? 'oh, my darling, you have knees! I never would have thought”

“I went to the door, and Gary tried hard not to notice I was blue. He looked at his feet, and he looked above my head, and he cleared his throat.

It's okay,' I said. 'I know I'm blue.'

It caught me by surprise,' he said. 'I didn't want to seem rude.”

“Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't--and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown.”

“It's surprising how hard we'll work when the work is done just for ourselves.”

“I'd rather be pleasantly surprised than fatally disappointed.”

“The first symptom of true love in a man is timidity, in a young woman, boldness. This is surprising, and yet nothing is more simple. It is the two sexes tending to approach each other and assuming each the other's qualities.”

“Men are easy,' he said, fingers tapping on his mahogany desk. 'A man's plumbing is like his mind: simple, very few surprises. You ladies, on the other hand… well, God put a lot of thought into making you.”

“One mind can think only of its own questions; it rarely surprises itself.”

“Just like the breakthroughs, the bad stuff always takes you by surprise. (121)”

“Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.”

“Life is full of surprises, but never when you need one.”

“She surprised him by agreeing. "Yes, I was simply curious, and no, I would never criticize you in front of your followers. Do you have the patience to endure one more question, husband?"

"What is it?"

"When do you suppose you'll leave me behind?”

“Storms, woman,” [Kaladin] said. “I don’t know what to make of you.”
“Preferably not a corpse.”
“I’m surprised someone hasn't already done that.”

“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?”

“Jules: Why are you on the floor?
Emma: I've heard roling out of bed in the morning helps you build up resistance to surprise attacks.
Jules: Oh yeah? What does screaming "holy crap!" do?
Emma: That part's optional.”

“It is a mistake to regard age as a downhill grade toward dissolution. The
reverse is true. As one grows older, one climbs with surprising strides.”

“But chance runs like a river through all our lives, and being prepared for surprise is the best we can do.”

“It's true that writing is a solitary occupation, but you would be surprised at how much companionship a group of imaginary characters can offer once you get to know them.”

“Here we are. Maybe I should warn you before we enter…(Asmodeus)
(Jericho stepped past him and threw open the door.)
Or maybe not. Let’s just barge in and be surprised, shall we? (Asmodeus)”

“You'd be surprised how many people in the modern age no longer fear zombies as much as teletubies.”

“We weren’t ourselves when we fell in love, and when we became ourselves – surprise! – we were poison. We complete each other in the nastiest, ugliest possible way.”

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

“Statistically the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you would think the mere fact of existence would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise.”

“He started to look at me in a manner I recognized: it was the way I looked at a new book, one I had never read before, one that surprised me with all it had to say.”

“It is on a day like this one,
a little later a little earlier
that you descover without surprise
that something is wrong
that you don't know how to live
and you will never know”

“I sent a quick text to Adrian:I honestly hadn’t expected him to be awake this early, so I was surprised to get a response:So typical of him. he wrote back. I didn’t dignify that with a response.”

“People surprise you sometimes.”

“The surprise is on the far side."
"You're sure?"
"Positive."
"It better not be another fairy," Seth said.
"What's the matter with fairies?"
"I've already seen about a billion of them and also they turned me into a walrus.”

“Are you going to shoot me?' Vengeous sneered. 'I wouldn't be surprised. What would a thing like you know about honor? Only a heathen would bring a gun to a sword fight.'

And only a moron would bring a sword to a gunfight.”

“…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.”

“I don't approve of surprises. The pleasure is never enhanced and the inconvenience is considerable.”

“That which is not slightly distorted lacks sensible appeal; from which it follows that irregularity—that is to say, the unexpected, surprise and astonishment, are an essential part and characteristic of beauty.”

“He knows bad days. Bad days take him completely by surprise. They make him not trust the good days because it's likely something is lurking twenty-four hours away.”

“Some people fall head over heels. Other people begin to fall without even knowing it—love grows like a spring flower beneath last autumn’s leaves and catches them by surprise.”

“What mattered was stil there. That was what they all felt, and what surprised them all. What mattered couldnt be shaken.”

“Pieces and parts were always easier to process. The full picture, the entire story, was another thing entirely. But you just never knew. Sometimes, people could surprise you.”

“You should never be surprised when someone treats you with respect, you should expect it.”

“If you're trying to take a roomful of people by surprise, it's a lot easier to hit your targets if you don't yell going through the door.”

“Onscreen, Foaly rubbed his eyelids with his index fingers.
"Yeah, yeah. Here we go. Captain Short goes rogue once more. Hands up who's surprised. Anyone?”

“He moved like a dancer, which is not surprising; a horse is a beautiful animal, but it is perhaps most remarkable because it moves as if it always hears music.”

“A man's plumbing is like his mind: simple, very few surprises. You ladies, on the other hand… well, God put a lot of thought in making you.”

“The ending is always a surprise.”

“Who I am, and what I am capable of doing has always managed to surprise me.”

“They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods.”

“I saw the movie, 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' and was surprised because I didn't see any tigers or dragons. And then I realized why: they're crouching and hidden.”

“When our inner child is not nurtured and nourished, our minds gradually close to new ideas, unprofitable commitments and the surprises of the Spirit.”

“Rarely do we invest the time to open the book of another's life. When we do, we are usually surprised to find its cover so misleading and its reviews so flawed.”

“People surprise you, Frank, with just how fuckin stupid they are. I mean, do you actually realize how much adult conversation is spent on this fuckin business? Facts treated like they were opinions just for the simple purpose of talking about it longer? Some people might think that's interesting, bub, but I'll tell you. It's romanticizing a goddamn rock by calling it a mountain range to me. People waste a helluva lot of time they could be putting to useful purposes. This is a game. See it and forget about it.”

“I am Jack's complete lack of surprise. I am Jack's Broken Heart.”

“Getting angry over something that won't change is like seeing what happens if you hit your hand with a hammer over and over again, and being surprised each time when it hurts. So you might as well stop doing it.”

“The future can ever promise but one thing and one thing only: surprises.”

“Alec took me by surprise”

“Where'er a noble deed is wrought,
Where'er is spoken a noble thought,
Our hearts in glad surprise
To higher levels rise.”

“The twentieth century has witnessed with surprise, not merely the promulgation of these ferocious doctrines, but their enforcement with brutal vigour by the Government and by the populace. No past services, no proved patriotism, even wounds sustained in war, could procure immunity for persons whose only crime was that their parents had brought them into the world. Every kind of persecution, grave or petty, upon the world-famous scientists, writers, and composers at the top down to the wretched little Jewish children in the national schools, was practised, was glorified, and is still being practised and glorified.”

“First, we didn't know ourselves. We thought we were going into another Korean war, but this was a different country. Secondly, we didn't know our South Vietnamese allies. We never understood them, and that was another surprise. And we knew even less about North Vietnam. Who was Ho Chi Minh? Nobody really knew. So, until we know the enemy and know our allies and know ourselves, we'd better keep out of this dirty kind of business. It's very dangerous.”

“I don’t know how to defend myself: surprised innocence
Cannot imagine being under suspicion.”

“Our units of temporal measurement, from seconds on up to months, are so complicated, asymmetrical and disjunctive so as to make coherent mental reckoning in time all but impossible. Indeed, had some tyrannical god contrived to enslave our minds to time, to make it all but impossible for us to escape subjection to sodden routines and unpleasant surprises, he could hardly have done better than handing down our present system. It is like a set of trapezoidal building blocks, with no vertical or horizontal surfaces, like a language in which the simplest thought demands ornate constructions, useless particles and lengthy circumlocutions. Unlike the more successful patterns of language and science, which enable us to face experience boldly or at least level-headedly, our system of temporal calculation silently and persistently encourages our terror of time.
…
It is as though architects had to measure length in feet, width in meters and height in ells; as though basic instruction manuals demanded a knowledge of five different languages. It is no wonder then that we often look into our own immediate past or future, last Tuesday or a week from Sunday, with feelings of helpless confusion.”

“Like Christianity, Buddhism explained suffering. In forms that established themselves in China, Buddhism offered the same sort of comfort to bereaved survivors and victims of violence or of disease as Christian faith did in the Roman world. Buddhism of course originated in India, where disease incidence was probably always very high as compared with civilizations based in cooler climates; Christianity, too, took shape in the urban environments of Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria where the incidence of infectious disease was certainly very high as compared to conditions in cooler and less crowded places. From their inception, therefore, both faiths had to deal with sudden death by disease as one of the conspicuous facts of human life. Consequently, it is not altogether surprising that both religions taught that death was a release from pain, and a blessed avenue of entry upon a delightful afterlife where loved ones would be reunited, and earthly injustices and pains amply compensated for.”

“Commonplace people have an answer for everything and nothing ever surprises them. They try to look as though they knew what you were about to say better than you did yourself, and when it is their turn to speak, they repeat with great assurance something that they have heard other people say, as though it were their own invention.”

“In the meantime, Mosul is very, very difficult. Do you know why? Because I don’t talk about military, and I don’t talk about certain other things, you’re going to be surprised to hear that. And by the way, my whole campaign, I’d say that. So I don’t have to tell you. I don’t want to be one of these guys that say, “Yes, here’s what we’re going to do.” I don’t have to do that. I don’t have to tell you what I’m going to do in North Korea. Wait a minute. I don’t have to tell you what I’m going to do in North Korea. And I don’t have to tell you what I’m going to do with Iran. You know why? Because they shouldn’t know. And eventually, you guys are going to get tired of asking that question.”

“Many who have visited me in Washington in the past few months may have been surprised when I have told them that personally and because of my own daily contacts with all manner of difficult situations I am more concerned and less cheerful about international world conditions than about our immediate domestic prospects.
I say this to you not as a confirmed pessimist but as one who still hopes that envy, hatred and malice among Nations have reached their peak and will be succeeded by a new tide of peace and good-will.”

““So, his Slavonic Majesty hires thieves to spy for him. Spying is such a foul business that I am surprised that even a good Angevin thief would stoop to it.” He turned to Lord Peter with a sudden realization. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to imply—”
”That’s all right, Your Highness,” Lord Peter said. “It’s a common reaction. Their spies are dirty, filthy scum, not fit to wipe your boots on, while our spies are noble gentlemen doing dangerous work for the love of King and Country. Would that it were so, Your Highness, but I’m afraid that sometimes the desired image is at fault—in both directions.””

“On finishing early at a rehearsal the London Symphony Orchestra leader Hugh Maguire said to Monteux: "Oh Maitre it is so nice to finish early. My wife will be so surprised." Monteux replied: "Be careful. You might be surprised!"”

“As an immigrant, I am constantly surprised by how much I hear racism talked about and how little I actually see it. (Even fewer are the incidents in which I have experienced it directly.)”

“It seems reasonable to suppose that conflict does exhibit many general patterns, that the patterns of conflict in industrial relations, international relations, interpersonal relations, and even animal life are not wholly different from one another, and that it is, therefore, worth looking for the common element. On the other hand, we should be surprised if there were no differences; the pattern of conflict in international relations, for instance, is not the same as in industrial or interpersonal relations. Just as it is important to perceive the similarities in different situations, so it is important to perceive the differences. These differences cannot be perceived, however, without a general theory to serve as a standard of comparison.”

“What surprised me, which Google was part of, is that superficial search techniques over large bodies of stuff could get you what you wanted. I grew up in the AI tradition, where you have a complete conceptual model, and the information retrieval tradition, where you have complex vectors of key terms and Boolean queries. The idea that you can index billions of pages and look for a word and get what you want is quite a trick. To put it in more abstract terms, it's the power of using simple techniques over very large numbers versus doing carefully constructed systematic analysis.”

“And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific reverse shock: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers around the racks invent, refine, discuss.People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind — it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it.”

“Yeah, especially this postmortem trip when people die and then everybody writes about what they felt that person is going through. It's really surprising to me that anyone can think that they have those kinds of insights or spend that much time really worrying about somebody else. I think they should spend more time trying to figure out who they are. That's my whole trip. I can't imagine anybody knowing me through my lyrics, because I don't particularly feel like I know myself. And I have more than the benefit of just lyrics to go on.”

“Imagine your brain as a canister filled with ink,
Now think of your body as the pen where the ink resides.
Fuse the two - Kapow! What are you now?
You're the human magic marker, won't you please surprise my eyes?”

“I shouldn't be surprised if it hailed a good deal tomorrow", Eeyore was saying. "Blizzards and what-not. Being fine today doesn't mean anything. It has no sig - what's that word? Well, it has none of that. It's just a small piece of weather.”

“The Court today finds that the Powers That Be, up in Albany, have conspired to effect an establishment of the Satmar Hasidim. I do not know who would be more surprised at this discovery: the Founders of our Nation or Grand Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum, founder of the Satmar. The Grand Rebbe would be astounded to learn that after escaping brutal persecution and coming to America with the modest hope of religious toleration for their ascetic form of Judaism, the Satmar had become so powerful, so closely allied with Mammon, as to have become an establishment of the Empire State. And the Founding Fathers would be astonished to find that the Establishment Clause — which they designed to insure that no one powerful sect or combination of sects could use political or governmental power to punish dissenters — has been employed to prohibit characteristically and admirably American accommodation of the religious practices (or more precisely, cultural peculiarities) of a tiny minority sect. I, however, am not surprised. Once this Court has abandoned text and history as guides, nothing prevents it from calling religious toleration the establishment of religion.”

“For a start, let's look at the Grotto itself. By and large these are extremely aptly named, 'Grot' meaning rubbish and 'Oh' being exclamation of disappointed surprise.”

“Somewhere in the trash he reads Martland has read that heavy men walk with surprising lightness and grace; as a result he trips about like a portly elf hoping to be picked up by a leprechaun.”

“[F]olks would better off dipping their heads in a bucket of liquid [nitrogen] and battering them against a tree very very hard than reading Baxter's Titan. It would not surprise me if reading that book causes birth defects.”

“I'm always surprised when anything about the band connects. But I love the fact that it's hard for people to understand. We've said before that it's always been a great thing to get certain people to go away thinking, 'Oh dear, she can't play the drums!' 'Fine, if you think it's all a gimmick, go away!”

“Pass in, pass in, the angels say,
In to the upper doors;
Nor count compartments of the floors,
But mount to Paradise
By the stairway of surprise.”

“The neanderthal experiment was simultaneously the high and low point of the genetic revolution. Successful in that a long-dead cousin of Homo sapien was brought back from extinction, yet a failure in that the scientists, so happy to gaze upon their experiments from their ever lofty ivory towers, had not seen so far as to consider the social implications that a new species of man might command in a world unvisited by their like for over 30 millennia. It was little surprise that so many neanderthals felt confused and unprepared for the pressures of modern life. It was Homo sapien at his least sapient.”

“[E]ven if we disagree about the Iraq invasion in 2003 and the consequent moves made by Bush 43 Administration, the decision of Obama Administration to retreat, especially announcing it, this is the worst you can do. At noon, at that day, that month, we are out. By sending the signal to the radical Islamists, to the forces that were about just to recover and prepare again for attacks against the free world, that was a recipe for disaster. It created a vacuum. It’s not a surprise that we live in a world today that is a much more dangerous place than in 2008. It helped Vladimir Putin to regain his confidence and because after his attack against the Republic of Georgia in 2008 in August, he was basically rewarded by Obama/Clinton “reset” policy instead of paying a price for taking territory of neighboring country.”

“The first period embraces the time between the first records of empirical determinations of the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle until the invention of the Differential and Integral Calculus, in the middle of the seventeenth century. This period, in which the ideal of an exact construction was never entirely lost sight of, and was occasionally supposed to have been attained, was the geometrical period, in which the main activity consisted in the approximate determination of π by the calculation of the sides or the areas of regular polygons in- and circum-scribed to the circle. The theoretical groundwork of the method was the Greek method of Exhaustions. In the earlier part of the period the work of approximation was much hampered by the backward condition of arithmetic due to the fact that our present system of numerical notation had not yet been invented; but the closeness of the approximations obtained in spite of this great obstacle are truly surprising. In the later part of this first period methods were devised by which the approximations to the value of π were obtained which required only a fraction of the labour involved in the earlier calculations. At the end of the period the method was developed to so high a degree of perfection that no further advance could be hoped for on the lines laid down by the Greek Mathematicians; for further progress more powerful methods were required.”

“We picked up Madonna at The Ritz to go to the Gaultier show together, and she took off her coat. At this point she hadn’t even said a word to me, but she leaned over and said to me, Anna, I have a surprise for you, and she showed me she was wearing my dress.”

“'Kant ought to be arrested and given three years in Solovki asylum for that "proof" of his!' Ivan Nikolayich burst out completely unexpectedly. 'Ivan!' whispered Berlioz, embarrassed. But the suggestion to pack Kant off to an asylum not only did not surprise the stranger but actually delighted him. 'Exactly, exactly!' he cried and his green left eye, turned on Berlioz glittered. 'That's exactly the place for him! I said to him myself that morning at breakfast: "If you'll forgive me, professor, your theory is no good. It may be clever but it's horribly incomprehensible. People will think you're mad."' Berlioz's eyes bulged. At breakfast… to Kant?”

“I wasn't surprised that she crossed over to the Liberals. I don't think she ever did have a Conservative bone in her body. Well, maybe one.”

“Is it any surprise, then, that Jesus felt such intense compassion for the poor and marginalized? That he constantly asked his disciples to care for the poor, the sick, the forgotten, the stranger? He was one of these throwaway people, and he lived among them for 30 years before his public ministry began. Christians tend to see Jesus’ commands to care for the poor as divine. And they were — Jesus was fully divine. But they also came from his human experience. He was fully human as well. I’m always amazed by people who feel they can be Christian without caring for the poor. Not only did Jesus command us to do this, Jesus himself was from this class. When God chose to join us, he joined us in Nazareth, to make sure that we wouldn’t forget.”

“First off, the whole point of airborne troops is surprise: you don't know they're coming until they're there. But because Cain arrived 24 hours after the first wave, the surprise was gone. And to make matters worse, the landing zone was some eight miles from the bridge. So, thanks to some incompetent planning by the top brass in England, the Germans knew that Cain and his men were coming, they knew where he landed, they knew where he was going, and they had the wherewithal to do something about it.”

“The violent quarrel between the abstractionists [like Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, both English sculptors] and the surrealists seems to me quite unnecessary. All good art has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained both classical and romantic elements – order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious. Both sides of the artist’s personality must play their part. And I think the first inception of a painting or a sculpture may begin from either end.”

“I had some good opportunities. I was lucky to have had the chance to do things differently. Architecture is about surprise.”

“They're also surprised I'm only 6 feet tall. They expect someone much bigger. They say I'm younger and prettier in person, which I like.”

“. Here [ Guernsey ] people bath among the rocks which serve as cabins, since there's nothing else; nothing is more attractive than this mixture of women and men crowded on these rocks. One would belief oneself in a landscape by Watteau rather than in the real world. So I'll have a source of real and graceful motives which I will be able to make use of. Some enchanting bathing-costumes... Nothing is more amusing when one is strolling through these rocks, than to surprise young girls getting ready to bathe... Despite the small number of things that I'll be able to bring back [to Paris], I hope to be able to give you an idea of these charming things.”

“[Of a wedding:] And so, standing before the aforesaid officiator, the two swore that at every other time of their lives till death took them, they would assuredly believe, feel, and desire precisely as they had believed, felt, and desired during the few preceding weeks. What was as remarkable as the undertaking itself was the fact that nobody seemed at all surprised at what they swore.”