Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best Surprise Quotes from famous authors such as Richard N. Haass, Thomas Piketty, Henry B. Eyring, Marlon James, AJ Lee. Let’s look at these pieces of wisdom. We definitely have something to learn from them!
1
The abolition of the presidential term limit and President Xi Jinping’s concentration of power have come as an unwelcome surprise to many.
2
I think if you look back through time, the history of income, wealth and taxation is full of surprise. So I am not terribly impressed by those who know in advance what will or will not happen.
3
To find gratitude and generosity when you could reasonably find hurt and resentment will surprise you. It will be so surprising because you will see so much of the opposite: people who have much more than others yet who react with anger when one advantage is lost or with resentment when an added gift is denied.
4
‘The Daily Mail’ interviewed my friends in Jamaica to find out if I was ever the victim of a vicious homophobic attack because, to them, I’m a gay refugee. But nothing like that happened. So, no surprise, that story didn’t appear. I’m really pretty boring.
5
There’s definitely a list of things I’d like to do. But there’s been a lot of things I hadn’t even thought would have been possible to do that I’d been able to do, so I think I’ll surprise myself and keep breaking that glass ceiling to see what’s next. Hopefully people get surprised – that’s my main goal.
6
Pour a liquid out of its container, and it changes shape, fills the space you give it. If you give children a lot of space, it may surprise you where they’ll go and the shape they’ll take.
7
Listen, I’ve been pretty fortunate. And if I’ve been underrated, it’s actually been something I’ve been able to work with; I can surprise people. It sets me up to exceed expectations, so I don’t mind.
8
Love is the motivating principle by which the Lord leads us along the way towards becoming like Him, our perfect example. Our way of life, hour by hour, must be filled with the love of God and love for others. There is no surprise in that, since the Lord proclaimed those as the first and great commandments.
9
Comedy, unlike drama, demands surprise. You can’t quietly and thoughtfully enjoy a comedy.
10
It isn’t as much of a surprise any more to see a woman’s name in the credits as director.
11
My spiked hair goes back about 15 years ago. I had long, curly rocker hair then. The woman who cuts my hair thought I needed a new style, so I let her surprise me. I flipped when I first saw it, but I soon realized the look was really me. I’ve always been a little crazy.
12
I write fast. But it takes me a while to get going. It’s very important for me to see my whole plot. I have to see the end first because I like a surprise in the end. Which is why I let characters and plot gestate in my mind.
13
My insights come in periods of working. There are wonderful moments of surprise, but I’m superstitious enough not to want to talk about them.
14
I wouldn’t say that I relax and enjoy anything. But I think my pessimism helps. I never really expect anything good to happen, so when it does, it’s a nice surprise.
15
Interventions are really emotionally exhausting and I would never ever want to have one. In the same way, I would never want to have a surprise birthday party. That would be horrible.
16
I think things can surprise you. I mean, I loved Instagram from the minute it started, but I think it surprised a lot of people how quickly it got huge.
17
For all our current troubles, Americans are still the hardest working, most innovative people on the face of the earth. By trusting the American people, instead of government, we’ll continue to surprise and inspire the world.
18
It’s no surprise that Mitt Romney bent himself into a pretzel to disavow the portions of Obamacare that derive from his own reform in Massachusetts.
19
When you put your characters in a dire situation, they often do things that surprise even you, so you have to go back and revise your original conception of who they are.
20
‘Tum Jo Mile’ came as a surprise. Vivek and Kumaar sir, who has written the song, sent me the track just to listen. I was in London at the time for my world tour. I heard the song, and I fell in love with it instantly.
21
Surprise drives progress because innovation depends on the sort of knowledge no one can gather in a central place.
22
I’d do almost anything for love, within safe boundaries. I’ve flown to places to surprise people, even if it was just for a day. I think it’s so important to keep the romance alive and make sure the fun and spontaneity are there.
23
Many of my poems try to use a comic element to reach a place that isn’t comic at all. The comic element works as a surprise. It is unexpected and energizing.
24
While pursuing my Bachelors with Psychology in Sophia College, I auditioned for an advertisement for Fairever Face Cream. And to my surprise I was selected amongst the top contestant, which paved a way for me to take this profession sincerely.
25
I prefer to surprise myself as I’m writing. I’m not interested in it if I already know where it’s going. So I have only the most general sense of what I’m doing when I start a story. I sometimes have a destination in mind, but how the story is going to go from Point A to Point Z is something I make up as I go along.
26
Television is fantastic because you get to follow a group of characters over time, and their stories can enrich and surprise you. And you get to work with a group of people over time as well, which can be very satisfying with the right group.
27
The thing about a cartoon is, you can do whatever you want. The tightrope that we are walking on ‘The Simpsons’ and ‘Futurama’ is ‘How do you continue to surprise the audience, but make them good surprises?’ Not every surprise is good, but you want to continue jolting people.
28
It was a surprise for my family when I told them that I was offered ‘Madras Cafe.’ My family was initially worried because I have got no film background.
29
Terrorists always have the advantage of surprise.
30
We need to live our truth. We need to discover ourselves. And no matter how much you prepare for everything, life will always find a way to surprise you.
31
In 2002, my daughter was diagnosed with a rare form of colon cancer. And it was such a shock, a surprise to us.
32
I knew nothing about film at all. I suppose the biggest surprise is all these things. In the theatre we sort of do, I might do two or three key interviews and that would be it.
33
The Padma Shri came as a very pleasant surprise. I am deeply honoured. I don’t know what I did to deserve it, but I must have done something right to be honoured by our government.
34
I guess I didn’t have a lot of friends, so that’s what made videogames so important. They played back. I could do them myself. Solitaire can’t surprise you; there’s no AI. But videogames play back with you.
35
However long, it’s definitely the presence of other people that brings out the weirdness – that collision of your own way of being with the everyday lives of others, the abrupt awareness – always a surprise no matter how often it’s happened – that their lives are very different from your own.
36
I surprise myself by the things I get excited by.
37
I discovered, to my surprise, that writing for live television made me a faster writer.
38
I love the surprise element of being a mom.
39
It is still a surprise when people tell me that I’ve had an influence on them, particularly when it’s someone I really respect.
40
I think music naturally wants to be played with more than one person. There’s a surprise element, and you don’t know what it will be, and it’s up to that other person’s energy to help create this third thing.
41
During my past career as a journalist, I relished writing obits and equally dreaded phoning relatives for the necessary facts. But to my surprise and great relief, they often wanted to talk – they wanted their recently deceased loved ones recorded in print.
42
Even before I came out, looking at me, I’ve probably looked a little gay. I had short hair, and, you know, it wasn’t a huge surprise to people. But some athletes have this image to uphold and may feel like sponsors won’t want them if they’re gay.
43
It’s no surprise to me or the other Isley brothers that I can sing, because I used to sing all the time in practice. The surprise is that somebody else likes it.
44
Nothing bores me more than books where you read two pages and you know exactly how it’s going to come out. I want twists and turns that surprise me, characters that have a difficult time and that I don’t know if they’re going to live or die.
45
When I tell people that I get interviewed five or six times more than I will interview players or coaches leading up to the game that comes as a surprise. That’s part of it and it just goes with being part of a Super Bowl broadcast team. I enjoy it.
46
I didn’t spend my childhood trying to be a performer; it was a big surprise to me that this was what I was doing. But it has always felt quite natural to me. I wasn’t taught to do what I do; I found out bit by bit.
47
It is always better to wait for a good surprise instead of thinking about it.
48
I’m good at forgetting auditions, and then there is a surprise to getting something.
49
When you play in smaller places with a smaller symphony, sometimes there’s a difference in quality. Sometimes it’s murderous. Sometimes it’s real torture. Other times, you get a wonderful surprise. But there’s never a dull moment.
50
Continue to surprise those who would put you in a neat demographic. Be insistently curious.
51
The biggest surprise about our marriage is that Erin was out there.
52
The tagline at Westin hotels is that they strive to surprise and delight their guests. This is exactly what a college essay should do.
53
My host at Richmond, yesterday morning, could not sufficiently express his surprise that I intended to venture to walk as far as Oxford, and still farther. He however was so kind as to send his son, a clever little boy, to show me the road leading to Windsor.
54
One of the things I love, and I’m a voracious reader as well as a writer, is books that surprise me, that are not predictable.
55
The benefit of the radio is, something beyond your realm of knowledge can surprise you, can enter your realm of knowledge.
56
It may be no surprise that Pittsburgh has direct flights to London, Paris and Frankfurt, but consider this: many of the tourists here have come from Europe to the capital of culture in the Alleghenies.
57
It was quite a surprise when I realized that with a single wormhole you could have time hook up towards the future or towards the past and that you can actually manipulate the wormhole and change how time hooked up.
58
People live in a place called Tornado Alley – and they’re surprised when they get hit by a tornado. I’m sorry when they get hit by tornadoes, but when you live in Tornado Alley you can’t really claim surprise.
59
I thought going in that I had to have this very broad, very palatable sensibility that works for everybody, but then the stuff that I’m the most proud of, and probably even got the most success from, was outwardly an expression of queerness or gayness. That’s been a nice surprise.
60
Awards are always a pleasant surprise. They are the candy-floss parts of our job – a lovely added extra to attract people’s attention. The bottom line is that you want to sell tickets.
61
Why, for example, do the great writers use anticipation instead of surprise? Because surprise is merely an instrument of the unusual, whereas anticipation of a consequence enlarges our understanding of what is happening.
62
Demoralize the enemy from within by surprise, terror, sabotage, assassination. This is the war of the future.
63
To my surprise, my 70s are nicer than my 60s and my 60s than my 50s, and I wouldn’t wish my teens and 20s on my enemies.
64
That so many binary or quasi-binary KBOs exist came as a real surprise to the research community.
65
Bob Marley performed the ‘One Love Peace’ concert in Jamaica with the two different warring political sides. There’s always been that in black music and culture in general. It’s no surprise because black music is such a reflection of what’s going on in black life. It’s not unusual for hip-hop.
66
The thing that we tell – that I tell – members is, ‘Vote your district. Vote your conscience; just don’t surprise us.’
67
The biggest threat to a better life is the desire to keep the future under control – to make the world predictable by reining in creativity and enterprise. Progress as a neat blueprint, with no deviations and no surprise, may work in children’s cartoons or utopian novels. But it’s just a fantasy.
68
I doubt whether the world holds for any one a more soul-stirring surprise than the first adventure with ice-cream.
69
Oh, the first dish I learned to make, I think I was about 10 years old, I made my dad spaghetti and broccoli for dinner when he got home from work, and it was, like, a surprise.
70
In life, all things have come to me as a surprise and I didn’t have any plans to do films. So let’s see how it goes.
71
I find myself eating different kinds of chicken each and every day, even if it’s by surprise.
72
It has happened a few times that I’ve found myself in a surprise mid-tour recording session.
73
Thinking of the dismissal by Leicester, the first thing that comes to mind is a sense of surprise even more than of bitterness.
74
It was a bit of a surprise when the national captaincy came my way.
75
‘Strong Island’ is slang for Long Island, New York. And it really grew out of – what may surprise people, it really grew out of the very vibrant hip-hop scene that, you know, is located and still generates artists out of Long Island.
76
It’s such a pleasant surprise when you come on set and you find someone in charge like Ken Branagh or James Ivory. You know that you’re going to do a day’s work and at the end of it, it’s going to be good.
77
The surprise is half the battle. Many things are half the battle, losing is half the battle. Let’s think about what’s the whole battle.
78
Many actresses do that kind of shoot when they are in their early 20s but I didn’t think I had anything to worry about so I decided to go for it. I was very pleased with the results and it was also nice to surprise a few people.
79
If you don’t take an opponent serious, they surprise you.
80
When you reach 95, after you get over your surprise, you start looking back.
81
When we began to tour, no one expected me to be a part of the band, so I used that as a tool, and would start the set off-stage or in the audience, as a surprise, because no one expected this little girl to get up and rock the way I do.
82
The moments of happiness we enjoy take us by surprise. It is not that we seize them, but that they seize us.
83
I don’t like to surprise anyone with the music I compose for a film. That way, there is less trouble later on.
84
I want to keep looking for roles that have an element of surprise.
85
Confidence, to me, is just pushing yourself a little bit further than you think you can go, and you’ll always surprise yourself.
86
‘The Good Wife’ was definitely the biggest surprise and gift that I’ve had in a long time, and that did come out of some other work that I had done. That whole adage of ‘work begets work’ actually worked in that case – it was at the very end of their first season that my character was first introduced.
87
To be honest, it was a little bit of a surprise to me that my Broadway debut was a musical.
88
As any parent, teacher, or librarian knows, there is no richer experience than to see children’s faces light up at the suspense of a new tale or the surprise of a new poem. The uninhibited joy with which they listen is surely akin to that of adult audiences of old around campfire and hearth.
89
Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.
90
One day I looked at something in myself that I had been avoiding because it was too painful. Yet once I did, I had an unexpected surprise. Rather than self-hatred, I was flooded with compassion for myself because I realized the pain necessary to develop that coping mechanism to begin with.
91
When you’re auditioning, hold on loosely. Work hard on it at home, like you always do. But when you’re in the room, let a choice happen to you rather than forcing a choice that’s not ready to come. You’ll surprise yourself and, hopefully, the people in the room.
92
First, a confession: I liked ‘The Da Vinci Code.’ This news is even more of a surprise to me than it might be to those who, years ago, heard me quip that I quit reading it because ‘the moment the albino assassin came through the door, I left.’
93
I am a little obsessed with surprise kitty.
94
It’s no surprise that hackers working for North Korea, Iran’s mullahs, Vladimir V. Putin in Russia, and the People’s Liberation Army of China have all learned that the great advantage of cyberweapons is that they are the opposite of a nuke: hard to detect, easy to deny, and increasingly finely targeted.
95
We grew up in a very creative environment and were exposed to the arts at a very young age, so it’s not a surprise that all of us are in some form of the arts.
96
‘Thunderbolts’ I was mostly attracted to because I really wanted to write Punisher and Elektra and Deadpool, who are characters I have always really enjoyed. But the funny thing is that over time, I came to really like Red Leader; he became one of my favorite guys in the book. Sometimes characters surprise you.
97
I do not personally agree with some of the positions that Mr. Gonzales has advocated, but that should come as no surprise, because I do not agree with many of the proposals made by the man who nominated him, President Bush.
98
Few, if any, political analysts predicted the Arab Spring. The raw energy of millions of protestors in the streets of Tunis and Cairo came as a surprise to many who believed that Arabs were essentially reconciled to their governments and non-democratic rule.
99
I assumed that ‘Gone Girl’ would do incrementally better than ‘Dark Places,’ and that would be great. So the fact that it did more than that was kind of an incredibly pleasant surprise.
100
We knew all along we were making a good show, so its success was not a surprise to me. What has surprised me is the magnitude of this show’s success. More people see me now in one episode than saw me in 20 years of movies and theater!
101
Anytime I’m involved with anything that’s well-received, it’s a surprise to me.
102
I really like it when you can step outside of what’s come before and find a surprise for the reader and find a surprise for yourself.
103
The biggest surprise about making a movie has got to be the wait in between takes.
104
Every coach in the league does an unbelievable job, and they’re prepared and think you’re going to outcoach people, or you think that you’re going to surprise, but you don’t.
105
I had a big group of harpists from Japan in October of 1973 ready to tour the country and the Yom Kippur War took us all by surprise. There were no concerts, no shows – there was no way for them to even leave because the airport was closed. I had to return the money. I had paid them in advance.
106
I’ve always liked New York, as I like towns with an edge and New York has a European feel, so when I came to play music here in the ’80s it was a surprise to me.
107
You surprise yourself on some balls off the bat. You don’t think you have a chance to catch it. And then your natural ability just takes over.
108
Humor’s always been the problem of my work, hasn’t it? When working, I feel satisfied when I surprise myself. And when I surprise myself, I wind up laughing.
109
You can’t surprise LeBron any more. He’s such a smart player. His intellect has caught up with his athletic ability.
110
Washington was taken by surprise by the Egyptian revolution because policy experts focused too much on Mubarak and his government, and too little on the ‘voice of the people.’
111
Most things in life come as a surprise.
112
I like to do new things, so I always take on roles that I feel will keep me on my toes. I never want to pigeon myself, so I always like to surprise myself. I believe in versatility and so I would play anything as long as it was a challenge.
113
That’s always the biggest surprise when people meet me: how buoyant I am and how fun and light I am.
114
Horror movies are all about getting your attention; you always have to be on guard. People love to be on the edge – there’s nothing like a surprise.
115
A Scout is never taken by surprise; he knows exactly what to do when anything unexpected happens.
116
Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.
117
I’m sure it won’t surprise you to learn that I kept a diary – actually, quite a number of them over the years.
118
Being a magician taught me how powerful the element of surprise can be. In each book, I’ve tried to work that in – an unexpected twist in a story that reveals an insight, a counter intuitive study that turns your beliefs upside-down.
119
A nice blend of prediction and surprise seem to be at the heart of the best art.
120
Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.
121
Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.
122
I realize that sometimes I get bothered when I see the world acting like the world. Did you hear what I said? The world is supposed to act like the world, and God tells us that every generation gets more wicked, so why the surprise? Maybe we have some word to swallow ourselves.
123
I don’t feel the need to be the hot chick every second of the day. I like to be able to surprise people when I turn it on. I want it to be like the movie ‘She’s All That’ when they unveil her.
124
The longer I’ve been doing this, the more I’ve realized that you have no idea what kinds of roles are possible for you – dream roles can take you by surprise. That being said, I need to play Hamlet one day. I’d also love to be in a play that I have written myself.
125
Nighttime frequently increases alertness, and each mission should consider the ramifications of a night assault. Several of the most successful special operations were conducted in daytime and achieved a high degree of surprise.
126
It caught us by surprise when people started calling us a boy band because we’d always considered ourselves pretty serious musicians.
127
If it comes as a constant surprise each and every time something unexpected occurs, you’re not only going to be miserable whenever you attempt something big, you’re going to have a much harder time accepting it and moving on to attempts two, three, and four.
128
That always catches you by surprise, you know, the amount of inspiration, should you choose to, that you can give to people.
129
The biggest surprise has been making the adjustment after losing a game. In the NBA you could lose tonight and you have to put that game behind you because you have another game the next night.
130
I just like the prospect of playing lots of different types of characters and just the opportunity to challenge yourself, do something different and surprise people.
131
It would probably surprise people how prevalent reading is in institutions – and the degree to which some states discourage reading by instituting draconian rules and laws that try to limit and outright roadblock books in prisons.
132
I like to be surprised! But it’s always hard to surprise me.
133
Surprise is important. I think that’s the essence of entertainment, really.
134
It came as a great surprise to receive an MBE and it is a true honor for me and my family.
135
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.
136
Of course, I have given my engineers some headaches over the years, but they go with me. I have always wanted my buildings to be as light as possible, to touch the ground gently, to swoop and soar, and to surprise.
137
The rules of suspense are that you do know, and you just don’t know when. In the Hitchcock rules of suspense, you are supposed to know that there is a bomb on the bus that might blow up, and then it becomes very tense – but if you don’t know that there’s a bomb and it just blows up, then it’s just a surprise.
138
Even though I’d been invited to the combine, I didn’t test particularly well. That didn’t really surprise me, I had I no expectation that I’d shock people with an insane 40 time. But I knew things weren’t looking good when I started getting asked a lot of questions about the size of my hands.
139
‘A Court of Thorns and Roses,’ big surprise, was inspired by music. By actually listening to the ‘Princess Mononoke’ soundtrack.
140
The rule has been that when one opens a new channel to the universe, there is usually a surprise in it. Why should the gravitational channel be deprived of this?
141
‘The Good Soldier’ is an odd and maybe even unique book. That it is a masterpiece, almost a perfect novel, comes as a repeated surprise even to readers who have read it before.
142
For me, what is most important is the element of surprise. If I can surprise you with every film of mine, that is exactly what I am trying to do.
143
There’s no longer any surprise in noting that China has grave environmental problems.
144
It’s to surprise people about something that is extremely well known. I mean human reproduction, the human body, nature and so on. To surprise them with a new technique.
145
It came as a surprise to find that a professional society and journal (Econometrica) were flourishing, and I entered this area of study with great enthusiasm.
146
The invention of the micro-loan was a big surprise to me. Who would have guessed loans of less than $20 made to poor people in undeveloped countries could create thriving local economies? And, even more surprisingly, that they more reliably pay off their debts than the wealthy of the world.
147
In books by women and for women, it should come as no surprise that heroines are the heroes of the action, finding themselves, their power and their future through love.
148
The pleasant surprise for me is that when I look into Tony’s eyes, he’s still 100% present, sharing everything that’s going on. Acting with him is like a beautiful dance.
149
Every day is a surprise. There are confirmations of an interconnectivity and synchronicity which inspire, titillate and confirm the inherent comedy of the universe.
150
I find out more about Jack every week. Essentially, I’m the same character, but I’m having more fun this season because I’m doing more aliases, you know. I like the surprise of not knowing.
151
When I call ‘Action,’ I love to be surprised. And the actors I’ve been fortunate enough to work with always surprise me in the best ways.
152
If they aren’t real enough to surprise me, then they aren’t real enough to go on the page.
153
The success of the storytellers – we’re only as good as what we can withhold from the audience. Aspects of surprise and letting things play out for the audience – it’s so much a part of their enjoyment. It’s one of the great things about working in the movies and being a great storyteller.
154
I don’t say that I’m going to be like every other comic that’s blue, or gratuitous use of language. I do try to have my own standards: I don’t do everything the audience wants, and I do try to surprise them.
155
Modesty means admitting the possibility of error, subsuming the self for the good of the whole, remaining open to surprise and the gifts that only failure can bring. There are many ways to practice it. Try taking up golf. Or making your own bagels. Or raising a teenager.
156
I didn’t picture myself as a movie actress. I began to think about it around college. I remember thinking, ‘Well somebody has to be in them,’ so maybe I could do that eventually. It’s all been a surprise.
157
It’s no surprise that whether by blocking visas or building walls, there are parts of the country desperate to hang on to a vision of the United States that is rapidly disappearing from their TV screens as well as their neighborhoods.
158
Throughout my career, there has always been an element of surprise. Sometimes there are moments of disappointment; sometimes there are moments of surprising success.
159
When people learn that I’m a qualified primary school teacher, I’m often met with surprise and a list of questions, including, ‘How do the children react? How do you do it?’ Children are some of the most open and inclusive individuals. It’s often us adults who have difficulties in accepting difference.
160
Comedy is surprise. Comedy is not something that you can, necessarily, do twice.
161
We did the original ‘Stargate’ as an independent movie. It was a surprise success. Shortly before the movie came out, the financiers who were frightened the movie might not do well sold the film to MGM. When the film came out, it was a hit and spawned TV shows.
162
I had been told by so many people that I was going to be nominated, that I should be nominated, that there wasn’t any question about my being nominated. I don’t think it was a surprise.
163
About 100 things that your kid will do that will surprise you and break your heart and it will be a combination of fact based therapy, medically advised kinds of passages accompanied by celebrity anecdotes and just some funny stuff to lighten the load.
164
Would it be a surprise if entrepreneurs recoil at the thought of consciously courting any person who has more power and money than they have?
165
Merit pay has failed repeatedly, and it’s no surprise. When you base teacher pay on standardized test scores, you won’t improve education; you just promote the high-stakes testing craze that’s led parents, students and educators to shout ‘Enough!’ all across the country.
166
I think the thing about cooking from tins for me that I really enjoyed was… the convenience of it, the slight entertainment side of it. Just the surprise of being able to crack open a couple of tins, pour them into a pan, and 15 minutes later you’ve got a fantastic dinner on the table.
167
When I wrote my first serious novel, ‘Interior’, I was inspired by a 1978 book of Updike’s, ‘The Coup’, which is set in Africa and will come as a delightful surprise to anyone who has only read his Americana.
168
In terms of the music, it feels almost like trouble’s a good thing – you never know when a song is going to surprise you. We look for these subversive moments in songs.
169
I’m not a big planner. Things always sort of surprise me.
170
I am more of a surprise kind of guy. I love to find out as I go.
171
If you are in banking and lending, surprise outcomes are likely to be negative for you.
172
The backbone of surprise is fusing speed with secrecy.
173
If we emit massive quantities of untested chemicals into the environment, some of them are bound to end up in places that surprise us, doing things that endanger us.
174
We don’t have a war on terror – that’s a technique. We didn’t have a war on blitzkriegs, and we didn’t have a war on surprise attacks.
175
I think as an actor you’ve got to try to preserve some of your mystery so that there’s still an element of surprise about where characters come from.
176
In making films, I’m constantly looking for people who are in conflict and who are going to surprise you and challenge you.
177
When I was happily married and found myself pregnant, I just thought that this would be just the next, normal chapter. I was absolutely thrilled. So what a surprise it was when it turned out to be the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
178
I love the element of surprise, throwing people off of what they think they know about what I can do and who I am. I just want to keep doing that.
179
The best live recordings capture elements of surprise onstage.
180
In real life, there are names that surprise us because they don’t seem to suit the person at all.
181
The really nice thing with ‘Future Past’ is that you actually have a superhero film – much to everyone’s surprise, I will hope – that is about something. It’s about racism, I hope. It’s about resisting oppression. It’s about fighting for freedom and the cost of fighting for freedom.
182
I thought, after the Pulitzer, at least nothing will surprise me quite that much in my life. And another one happened. It was quite amazing.
183
We make a lot of movies that I don’t think merit a wide release. We have this label called Tilt, and we have the movies come out on that, and that’s fine. But it shocks me when, having done this a few times, when I really believe a movie should get a wide release, and I struggle to get it released. That does surprise me.
184
The great thing about being an actor is things happen to you very quickly. I like to put myself in the way of surprise.
185
Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.
186
The husband who decides to surprise his wife is often very much surprised himself.
187
You know who I’d like to open for? This will be a surprise, but I’ll tell you who: Iron Maiden.
188
After my crash I never doubted it would be hard but I would be lying to say this new life has been a surprise to me.
189
When we perform music at TV shows, we always try to do something that’s not scripted because anything that’s a surprise for the audience and the crew and the other performers, it works better on camera and for the people back home, too.
190
Winning the Absa Cape Epic already was a wonderful surprise. The World Cup was, for sure, my main goal, but winning all of them was nothing I had planned on.
191
It’s not exactly a big surprise that women mature earlier than men do. As a result, they tend to display better judgment, particularly when it comes to money.
192
I’ll never forget the first screening at the Berlin Film Festival. As soon as the film ended there was an outbreak of booing, which made us look at each other with some surprise.
193
Since JPMorgan Chase announced its surprise $2 billion-and-growing trading loss, there have been renewed calls from economists, pundits, and politicians to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, a Depression-era law that prevented commercial banks from participating in investment banking activities.
194
I think I surprise myself.
195
Many people focus on my power and talk about my power, but I have many more qualities in the ring. I like to surprise everyone.
196
Nothing surprises me. One thing I don’t ever have in my world is surprise.
197
I always surprise myself with my voice. A lot of people don’t get it, and they’re like, ‘You can’t sing. Stop. What are you doing?’ And it’s funny to hear a lot people say I sing in falsetto because it’s not falsetto – that’s my voice.
198
As President Obama is inaugurated for a second time, the biggest political surprise is that gun control is now key to his political legacy.
199
Is it a surprise that into the vessel, in which the mercury has no inclination and no repugnance, not even the slightest, to being there, it should enter and should rise in a column high enough to make equilibrium with the weight of the external air which forces it up?
200
Embrace risk. The driving force behind our economic model at Illumination Mac Guff is designed to preserve the opportunity to take risk. Subvert the expectation of the audience. Surprise them with unexpected choices.
201
’21 Jump Street’ is great. I just made that, and produced it and was a writer on it. It’s starring myself and Channing Tatum, and maybe some surprise guests.
202
Though times have changed, it’s a nice surprise to see that youthful feeling of anti-war sentiment returning once more to the cobbled main streets of Europe.
203
It will not surprise you to learn that it is not uncommon for jockeys who struggle with their weight to starve themselves and spend hours in the sauna to lose a few pounds to be able to make a big-race ride.
204
I always like to come with stuff people don’t expect me to. I like the element of surprise.
205
The biggest surprise to people is that I sang background on Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’ album.
206
I’m a great believer in the beauty and the power of surprise.
207
The major international appeal for ‘House of Cards’ was kind of a surprise because it’s a very American show. What we learned is that American politics is very American, but greed and corruption and all of that is very global.
208
Something that’s very important is to preserve the sense of surprise, the sense of discovery. The eye of the person you are talking to, your shadow on the ground. It’s important not to get suffocated by all the things in life and lose that sense of surprise.
209
Surprise, surprise! I have a band! I’m really excited that we have a song on the soundtrack of ‘American Reunion’ for that very reason.
210
‘Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto’ is a surprise and a fresh way of looking at Harlem, connecting the black district with the architecture of its historical past.
211
As West Indians we have always been disrespected. As soon as we fight back they make it look like we are the bad one in the media. We’ve experienced these things over the years. So it’s no surprise.
212
One of the more difficult tasks for me as president was to decide on the issue of confirming capital punishment awarded by courts… to my surprise… almost all cases which were pending had a social and economic bias.
213
From time to time, people pat me on the head. It happens on public transport, in the supermarket, in bars. It’s a common enough occurrence that it very rarely takes me completely by surprise.
214
I ask all my actors to do two things: I ask them to fail for me, and I ask them to surprise me.
215
It’s always a pleasant experience while acting because I like to surprise myself and the audience with what I do.
216
The World Championship gold was a surprise and took a lot of pressure off in terms of qualifying for Rio, but I still need more points, and winning in Manchester would be massive for me.
217
To me, the biggest surprise is that Google still functions despite the explosion in the number of sites.
218
It’s amazing how, in New York, there is almost a feeling of entitlement by the public – this very palpable lack of surprise at being stopped in the street and being asked to be the subject of a 12-foot monumental painting.
219
One thing that is exciting about fashion is the surprise element. People don’t know what they want. They just know when they see it.
220
Scratch an artist and you surprise a child.
221
And it is very sexy as well: somebody says I’m taking you on a surprise date, you don’t know where you are going and you can’t see and then you put your hand out and there is a tiger. Amazing.
222
Man is always more than he can know of himself; consequently, his accomplishments, time and again, will come as a surprise to him.
223
One of the things I love so much about horror is the way it uses surprise, and when I write, it’s about: What have we not seen before? What’s going to surprise us? If we’re not going beyond, taking that challenge, I get kind of bored.
224
Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
225
It was a real surprise to me to come across the evidence that Christianity might once have been a danced religion. Certainly, some of the early church leaders thought this was great and spoke of what seems to have been circle dancing, perhaps around an altar.
226
I think it might surprise the average person how angry people can get over the comics.
227
It’s hard to surprise people with everything leaking on the Internet.
228
Our society is not perfect and this will come as no surprise to many of you.
229
Jeff Eastin is good in that he’ll tell me a plot twist that’s coming up if he thinks it would be something Peter would know ahead of time, and if it’s something that would be a surprise to Peter, I’ll tell Jeff, ‘Oh, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.’ And then it’s exciting to read it and exciting to play it.
230
There’s nothing I really wanted to record more than Bach. It’s wonderful music. It’s – on a grand scale, there’s a lot to it. There are – I can work on it for a long time and keep discovering more things, you know, that surprise me every time.
231
Actually, I didn’t make the claim that Ruby follows the principle of least surprise. Someone felt the design of Ruby follows that philosophy, so they started saying that. I didn’t bring that up, actually.
232
The path that went by the little house had become a road. Almost every day Laura and Mary stopped their playing and stared in surprise at a wagon slowly creaking by on that road.
233
My imagination, my ability to understand the way love and people grow over time, how passion can surprise and renew, utterly failed me.
234
Mr. President, it may surprise my colleagues, but I am no fan of federal disaster programs for agriculture. They are difficult to pass and often a disaster to implement.
235
I’m writing a new love story, set in eastern North Carolina. Surprise, surprise, huh?
236
Family really meant almost nothing to me for many years but then, to my enormous surprise, when I met my partner James I found myself re-engaging and re-connecting. My mother died in 1977 but I got to know my father as an adult, and he got on well with James. A rapprochement with my whole family followed.
237
The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure.
238
The tax code is becoming steadily more progressive, which shouldn’t surprise anyone who understands power politics. It’s always easier to force sacrifice on an unpopular minority than it is to ask the majority to pony up.
239
The idea that ‘if you don’t like how things are going, you can just leave’ is so ingrained in Texas, the secession movement is no surprise.
240
It’s not a huge surprise that there are habitations at the bottom of the Black Sea.
241
Be transparent about why the termination is happening. If you did things right, it shouldn’t be a surprise to the person.
242
When you look at the money spent by labor unions for Democrats, it comes as no surprise the Democrats crafted a campaign-finance ‘disclosure’ bill with the thresholds adjusted to exempt unions.
243
Jazz and poetry both involve a structure that may be familiar and to some extent predictable. And then, you try to create as much surprise and spontaneity and feeling and variation while respecting that structure.
244
T.V. found me. I was offered jobs. It came in handy when I started having babies. Just one night’s work, and then I could go home. I loved ‘Surprise Surprise’, but it was hard work. ‘Blind Date’ was a doddle by comparison.
245
That’s the tricky thing these days: being able to surprise people.
246
There is no doubt I have offended many people. No doubt, also, that I have blasphemed. I sometimes try to offend as part of my routine – after all, the essence of humour, even in a child, is the effort to shock and surprise.
247
Being a father is a surprise for me every day.
248
Harry Kane, for example, is a really physical striker but also really skilful. He surprises lot of defenders, but he won’t surprise me.
249
I don’t think it should be a surprise for anyone to hear that I’m gay.
250
Baggio is a unique player. It should not surprise you that he gets the most press. But you must remember that it takes a full team to win.
251
Growing old has been the greatest surprise of my life.
252
Carlton Cole is no surprise to me anymore. For me, some of the bits he does are unbelievable.
253
The hardest thing to do in wrestling is that every time you show up, there’s just a ring with three ropes, turnbuckles on each side, it’s extremely hard to do something to surprise and shock the fans.
254
What was so lovely about ‘O.J.’ and ‘This Is Us’ to a certain extent is that I got a chance to surprise people.
255
There are things that are really disappointing about being an actress in Hollywood that surprise me all the time.
256
I got a call from Shoaib Mansoor, and he asked if I’d be interested in doing the music of ‘Bol.’ I said, ‘Why not?’ and suggested we meet. When we did, to my surprise, he offered me the chance to act in the lead role. After reading the script, I was even more interested in doing it.
257
You have actors you’ve worked with previously, and you have actors you haven’t worked with that you’ve seen in things where you know they can work in these parts. And then there are actors who blow you away, who surprise you.
258
There is a child inside me that wants to come out and do something to surprise all the adults.
259
I want to surprise all the fans, all the people in MLS.
260
It’s great to surprise people. If you do the same thing all over again, which people expect you to do, they’re going to get bored.
261
A lot of people say I am not tall and I am small guy. But I jump very high. I surprise a lot of people when I go for the corner kicks.
262
I constantly want to do something new and surprise the audience.
263
I think a lot of politicians, rightfully so, understand that their political futures are tied to how many times people see their names in print. The press is so accustomed to politicians wanting those things, it’s a surprise when somebody’s like, ‘Whatever, I’m not really worried about those things.’
264
Football is about dreams, about feeling a special sensation, giving a surprise, and inspiring joy.
265
I wouldn’t say I’m a very controlling person. For instance, when I talk to the actors, I don’t tell them exactly what I want because I want them to surprise me. I even encourage them to change some of the verses of the script if they need to.
266
I want to be able to still surprise myself, even shock myself, whether it be sexual content, whether it be about the theological content, whatever. I want to be able to knock myself sideways. Otherwise, what a waste of a life that would be.
267
The pleasure we derive from doing favors is partly in the feeling it gives us that we are not altogether worthless. It is a pleasant surprise to ourselves.
268
You never want your second act or the whole movie to just be this relentless march towards its goal. You want things to take the audience by surprise.
269
The Heisman attention has definitely been a little bit of a surprise. It’s been out of my hands. It’s something I’m not focused on. I’m focused on the season and trying to win as many games as possible.
270
I was something of a surprise to my parents. My mum, Margaret, was 42 when she had me and had been told she couldn’t have children. So when she went to the doctors, they thought she had an ovarian cyst. And it was me!
271
It’s hard to go from good to great. You go from one to seven by eliminating stupid things. Let’s not have 12 penalties in a game. And you surprise some people. When you’re a seven-win team, everyone sees you coming.
272
I identify myself as a explorer, do new things, surprise myself.
273
Art must take reality by surprise.
274
What’s challenging is to surprise the audience.
275
The secret to humor is surprise.
276
I love doing characters that surprise people and showing what I am, which is an actor, first and foremost.
277
In the U.S., these sights are no longer a surprise to me. I see army generals, captains of industry, and politicians of all colours and creeds on American television.
278
I hope it will come as no surprise that I have something to say.
279
It’s awesome to have the fans come up and say, ‘Hey, Duck, what’s up?’ When people call me Devlin, it catches me by surprise.
280
Sometimes you surprise yourself with what you can handle, and if you come out the other end with some wisdom, then it’s not such a bad thing.
281
I was clearly the singing and dancing actor. When I was picked for serious roles, it came to me as a surprise.
282
I have received the greatest honor in my life – and the greatest surprise. Never did I dream that the Nobel Prize could be awarded for the reciprocal relations.
283
I always try to put myself in the way of surprise as much as possible. My ambition is to keep challenging myself. I like that journey of discovery.
284
There is no such thing as an average person. They really are guidelines for people to grapple with the unknown, and we can always surprise expectations.
285
I don’t think the government is out to get me or help someone else get me but it wouldn’t surprise me if they were out to sell me something or help someone else sell me something. I mean, why else would the Census Bureau want to know my telephone number?
286
I’m a sucker for expertly-executed detail and surprise elements in clothing.
287
Our discomfort with female leadership runs deep. We call little girls bossy. We never really call little boys bossy, because a boy is expected to lead, so it doesn’t surprise or offend.
288
The fun thing about Snapchat is really the surprise and the joy that comes from learning how to use it.
289
It’s always a surprise! This business is always an adventure.
290
Pop shouldn’t be a comfortable slipper. It should shock and surprise you and confront your expectations.
291
One thing that seems to surprise the studios is finding out later my willingness to audition. Under the right circumstances, I actually enjoy it very much.
292
Bitcoin and the block chain enables a whole new way to incentivize and transact, so change the world with this new tool. Create and build! Surprise us with an idea we have never seen before.
293
Brad was a huge surprise to me. I think we were both the last two people who were looking for a relationship. I certainly wasn’t. I was quite content to be a single mom with Mad.
294
Radiohead showed a real affinity to being bold with visual imagery, so it came as no surprise when Jonny Greenwood did ‘There Will Be Blood.’
295
The first thing to be said about ‘Prague Winter,’ former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s new book, is that she very wisely chooses to confront early on in it her apparent surprise at learning late in life that she was born Jewish.
296
Well, because my films are really about how people interact with each other, and the complexity, and the nuance, and the surprise of those moments I try to create a safe enough space that allows the actors to operate from their own instincts. My direction is more suggestions, prompts or questions.
297
I don’t know why it surprises people that I surprise them.
298
I always think back to that first night in Brooklyn, where I debuted, and it was this total surprise. I just remember thinking, ‘I hope they care. I hope they remember me.’ The way they embraced me that night, I knew it was the start of something special.
299
As human beings, we are addicted to novelty. Part of being stylish is surprisingness. Part of being an artist is surprisingness. If there are ingredients of beauty, it certainly is one of them. Surprise is like a spice on the meal, it makes you say: ‘woo’.
300
When I did ‘Bird,’ it was a surprise to some people, first because I wasn’t in it and second because most of the films I’d been doing were cop movies or westerns or adventure films, so to be doing one about Charlie Parker, who was a great influence on American music, was a great thrill for me.
301
It doesn’t surprise me at all that a Treasury secretary would find a decentralized potential currency… to be hostile to a currency that they control.
302
I do reread, kind of obsessively, partly for the surprise of how the same book reads at a different point in life, and partly to have the sense of returning to an old friend.
303
It’s much easier for me to do an impression of someone real, because you and the audience begin with a baseline understanding of this person’s life. And then if you subvert that in any way, it’s a little comedy surprise.
304
Being a unique superpower undermines the military intelligence of strategy. To think strategically, one has to imagine oneself in the enemy’s place. If one cannot do this, it is impossible to foresee, to take by surprise, to outflank. Misinterpreting an enemy can lead to defeat. This is how empires fall.
305
The day has to come when it’s not a surprise that a woman has a powerful position.
306
It was a sort of weird, troubled road into acting because I had been a bit naughty in school until I did my Highers, and then I was like, ‘Oh, I think I’m going to apply myself and surprise everyone.’
307
The success of the second ‘Austin Powers’ caught us by surprise a little bit. We had decided not to do even a second one, unless the audience wanted it and we could do something better.
308
I don’t think of it as a competition – which might surprise you, given the way movies are reported constantly.
309
It sounds terribly cynical, but the real surprise in the Philando Castile case is not that the officer was acquitted but that he was charged at all. The prosecutors in the case deserve great credit for even trying. But no one should be shocked about how it turned out.
310
The original project began because we know the universe is expanding. Everybody had assumed that gravity would slow down the expansion of the universe and everything would come to a halt and collapse. The big surprise was it was actually speeding up.
311
Be Prepared… the meaning of the motto is that a scout must prepare himself by previous thinking out and practicing how to act on any accident or emergency so that he is never taken by surprise.
312
It’s always fun to be the underdog and surprise people. It certainly puts less pressure on you.
313
Like anything else, acting can become boring – a chore, really – if there isn’t any challenge. And I like taking challenges. Just when people think they have me figured out, I like to surprise them.
314
We think till the last minute that nothing can happen to us. But cancer will grab you by surprise, and then it’s too late.
315
I’m awkward at these things. Just being nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Karate Kid was a real surprise and I was a little uncomfortable.
316
I was never particularly academic, so it was no great surprise when I failed my 11-plus and consequently went to Wibsey Secondary Modern. I did all right in English, history and music, which were the subjects that most interested me.
317
The single biggest surprise about arriving to the Senate is the defeatist attitude here.
318
With solos, I don’t like to be too prepared going in – I like to surprise myself.
319
It is really no surprise that, in a media world that has been so compromised by an invasion of political partisans and inarticulate airheads with communications degrees, a fake journalist can seem more trustworthy than the real thing.
320
This is probably going to surprise people, but if you were to do a scan around the globe on public policy concerning our industry, you would probably have to conclude that the United States has the policy that has been, I believe, the most pro competition.
321
I remember being asked for the first time about my race, and it really took me by surprise, just that it was a point that needed to be raised – and then I quickly realised that it was a point that everyone wanted to talk about!
322
I think the movie business is in trouble. It’s all movies that you’ve seen before. Everything’s a remake; they want things that are familiar rather than things that surprise you.
323
I think I’m going to surprise a lot of people.
324
I do all that I can to surprise people and make things unpredictable because that is what makes wrestling fun.
325
I heard that the same thing occurred in a scene in Alien, where the creature pops out of the chest of a crewman. The other actors didn’t know what was to happen; the director wanted to get true surprise.
326
When you can surprise yourself, you’re truly acting.
327
On Monday and Thursday, I eat fewer than 500 calories a day; then I eat like a pig for the other five days. You ‘surprise’ the body: keep it guessing. I got the idea from a BBC documentary about this Indian man who seemed about 138 years old and said his secret was severe calorie restriction.
328
For evening stuff, I like Topman. It’s good value; it fits well. I surprise a lot of people when they ask me what I’m wearing, and I say Topman. They always expect it to be something more expensive.
329
What’s great about bacteria is you have a surprise every day waiting for you because they’re so fast, they grow overnight.
330
Everybody knows a guillotine choke, and most know how to get to one. But if you can create a different way to get to that choke, then you’re going to surprise people. However, that will only happen one time, because once it gets used that one time, everyone will see that and start to train for it.
331
It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one fine day you discover to your surprise that you have rendered something in its true character.
332
My interest is to do interesting lead parts, to tell different stories and to surprise the audience. But as they say in Mumbai, everything is pre-written and it chooses you.
333
When we think about big records, a lot of producers are thinking of how to make it as standard as possible. I think those days are gone. I think you have to surprise the audience in 2015.
334
Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
335
The UK downgrade will come as little surprise to many. It does not appear to be occurring because the UK is cutting its deficit too far and too fast.
336
When you’re willing to be vulnerable, you can surprise yourself at how strong you can be.
337
The Governors Ball is like a big birthday party, and all these stars are like excited kids running around – ‘Oooo, look at my pretty new dress!’ And what’s the best, most fun surprise at a birthday party? When the cake comes out!
338
For a long time, I had the idea that I would do a certain amount of work the best I could, and then I would reach a comfort zone, and I wouldn’t be pushed to write more. I would become a different person. It’s a surprise to me that this hasn’t happened. Your body ages, but your mind is the same.
339
My parents themselves both went to university, and they very much expected me to be an intellectual and go through further education, and it’s to kind of their surprise that I became an athlete.
340
I think when you don’t know where you stand with someone, they can surprise you in their goodness and their badness, and that makes them human.
341
My love for the theater has always been a priority. That hasn’t changed. I got into acting that way. The film work that came up was really a surprise.
342
Winning Wimbledon in 2011 was a bit of a surprise for everyone, including me. It was like I was in a dream, and I didn’t realise what it meant.
343
I make music and hope people enjoy it – but when they do it’s always a surprise. A nice surprise, but not one that I expect to always be there.
344
Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.
345
I don’t repeat that many styles if I can help, although some have become classics. I try not to repeat. I’d rather surprise people.
346
I’m always imposing my taste in books on others. I hope that people enjoy being surprised by a book they might not otherwise read – I enjoy the surprise myself when others do this to me.
347
I think it’s important for artists to work together. It’s great for fans to see, like, Ludacris came out to our show in Atlanta and kinda made a surprise appearance there, it shows a mutual respect for what each other does.
348
It was a bit of a surprise when I became a Tory MP. My friends said it was a stupid idea.
349
All the things that most kids hated, I loved. I loved that things were asked of me and that, much to my surprise, I was able to do them. I loved the 10 o’clock bedtime. I loved the responsibility.
350
I personally take cues directly from the script, then I like to surprise the other actors. But you must maintain control on a level and see how far you can go up, down or out emotionally. You have to balance the craft with spontaneity.
351
Even if I never sold another book, I’d keep writing, because the stories are here, in my head. Stories that just need to be told. I love watching a plot unfold, and feeling the surprise when the unexpected happens.
352
The more challenges that are thrown at you, the more reward there is on the other side because you surprise yourself and say, ‘Wow, these are things I didn’t realize I was capable of.’
353
I had a pregnancy that wasn’t private… A lot of people had their opinions about it. They were surprised that I came up pregnant, which was a surprise to me, because I’m a woman, and women get pregnant, and Lauren comes first before the actress, so having my son was the best thing that ever happened to me.
354
The politics of surprise leads through the Gates of Astonishment into the Kingdom of Hope.
355
There are times when I surprise myself with the kind of patience I have shown and then there are times when I felt that I could have handled it easily but I made a mountain out of a mole.
356
Everything for me starts very small and snowballs. So I rarely start with the grand idea and find a place for it and narrow down. It’s, really, just start small, and as I’m writing it, I begin to see – sometimes to my own surprise – what’s unfolding and what’s blooming.
357
I actually am grateful for Freddy Krueger, because the big surprise to me – with that sort of double punch of science fiction TV series and then the ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ phenomenon – was that I got an international celebrity out of it.
358
I have heard that the Saudi Arabians are paying Greenpeace to campaign against Nuclear Power. It wouldn’t surprise me at all.
359
Everybody always talks about it, about how you don’t know love until you meet your baby, and you really feel that. There are no words. It was a really wonderful surprise. And there is no way to prepare yourself for the sleep deprivation and what comes with it.
360
I guess I don’t really measure myself by what others think. So even though I have gotten to work with some amazing directors, and you might perceive me to be that girl, that isn’t how I see myself. So if one day nobody wants to work with me, it won’t be this massive surprise.
361
As children we were bombarded by competing answers. Church says one thing, school another. Now as adults it’s no surprise that if we discuss the nature of it all, we generally spout some combination of the two, depending on our individual inclination and mood.
362
It’s a big surprise for me because if somebody asked me when I was playing if Frank Lampard would be a manager, I would say no because he’s very quiet.
363
There’s this element of surprise when you’re writing songs, like it’s something outside of you that you get to be part of. And it’s just exciting. And that’s why I keep writing – because I like that feeling.
364
It did surprise me to be made captain. The obvious issue is my English. It’s not that great, so communicating with players is not always easy. But I am thriving on the responsibility, both on and off the field.
365
There is always the fear of failure, and if you struggle, you become nervous, and that’s when the underdogs have an opportunity to create a surprise.
366
Now, honestly, every movie set that I go on, I walk onto set with the confidence that there is nothing that they can throw at me that’s gonna surprise me.
367
It does surprise me that intelligent people in the 21st century could claim that if you respond to the terrorists with force, you spawn terrorism, but if you appease them, you somehow tame them. This argument, as I said, is very interesting, and very surprising.
368
So many times, people want you to stay the way you were, be as you were before because they want to encapsulate you in a time so they can remember their youth. But you’re here to continually push forward and move forward. That’s where I’m at – I just want to always surprise people.
369
It was very difficult to startle or surprise someone with a particular sound during the family computer era.
370
The avant-garde theater is fun; it is free-swinging, bold, iconoclastic, and often wildly, wildly funny. If you will approach it with childlike innocence – putting your standard responses aside, for they do not apply – if you will approach it on its own terms, I think you will be in for a liberating surprise.
371
I had fractures in my spine that had to be repaired that came as a big surprise; nobody warned me that I might get some really severe, threatening fractures. It was painful, and I lost two inches of height, bang!
372
I had no idea what awaited me when I took a job with CBS Records, and it was a total surprise to find I had a gift and an ear for music.
373
I’m excited to bring in a new fan base for ‘Charmed’ and to surprise and shock the old ones as well – bridge the gap between both. Maybe I’ll get some superpowers!
374
Surprise is not humor. I think that there can be a fine line there.
375
I show the people I love that I love them by gathering them in my kitchen and feeding them, so no surprise that most of my characters do the same thing.
376
What I treasure most at any moment is intimacy, surprise, a sense of mystery, wit, depth and love. A handful of cherished friends offer me this, and the occasional singer or film-maker or artist. But my most reliable sources of electricity are Henry David Thoreau, Shakespeare, Melville and Emily Dickinson.
377
I believe that, by and large, people are good and everybody you meet is more likely to surprise you in a positive way than in a negative way.
378
In 2012, Vladimir Putin returned to the presidency after a four-year, constitutionally imposed hiatus. It wasn’t the smoothest of transitions. To his surprise, in the run-up to his inauguration, protesters filled the streets of Moscow and other major cities to denounce his comeback.
379
It would probably surprise people to know that I’m interested in wildlife. I read a lot of poetry, too.
380
Everything that is new or uncommon raises a pleasure in the imagination, because it fills the soul with an agreeable surprise, gratifies its curiosity, and gives it an idea of which it was not before possessed.
381
The biggest lesson that I’ve learned is that fashion is this tightrope where you have to be consistent but inconsistent. You need the connective thread but at the same time you need a sense of surprise.
382
They say that our sense of smell is one of the strongest triggers of memories. Of course, our sense of smell is integral to our sense of taste, so it is no surprise, then, that in a life full of moving and traveling, food has always been a source of familiar comfort for me.
383
I saw a story in the Los Angeles Times that 40 percent of the viewers are men. It didn’t really surprise me.
384
Do not know yourself. I want to continue to surprise me.
385
While the wealthiest families completely benefit from the tax cuts targeted towards the upper brackets, middle-income families were hit with the unwelcome surprise of higher taxes on tax day.
386
Detroit is drunken idiots. It was no surprise to me. I performed with Kenny Rogers for one year as his opening act, and I got to visit every major American city and notice the audience, and Detroit was one of the worst.
387
I always want to surprise myself, more than anybody else.
388
It’s a ridiculously expensive time of year and if you buy something that you’ve guessed at and it’s not right, what a waste of money. Far better to ask. And if you do it with three or four weeks to go, by the time it comes to Christmas you’ve forgotten about it – so it’s a lovely surprise.
389
There is no surprise more magical than the surprise of being loved: It is God’s finger on man’s shoulder.
390
Whenever death may surprise us, let it be welcome if our battle cry has reached even one receptive ear and another hand reaches out to take up our arms.
391
The first two pictures I did, I played a young student in prep school. When I did Lifeguard, everyone was saying, You’re so Southern California. It was a surprise to me.
392
I want to evolve each season. I never want to be one of those brands where people know what they’re going to see. I always want an element of surprise. One thing I never want to do is copy what anybody else is doing. I have a signature, and it’s very important to me to stay true to that.
393
One movie I think is just terrific is ‘Bernie,’ with Jack Black and Shirley MacLaine. That was a great surprise to me – so witty, so entertaining, a true story, and I’m not a great Jack Black fan, but he’s great in it. I think it’s a gem.
394
Don’t invite me to a surprise birthday party. I don’t have room for that secret. I’ve got enough real secrets I have to keep: dark, life-destroying secrets.
395
Generally my typical books have lots of twists and turns a big surprise ending and then usually another surprise at the end and ideally, as in Garden of Beasts, we get to the very end and we find at the last few pages that there’s yet another surprise.
396
I wish I could relive those days when I was 8 and my mother bought all the gifts I gave to people. I loved watching people open them. It was a surprise for me and then.
397
I can’t imagine, I can’t get in the mind of a wrestling fan who wants to break news that spoils a surprise for somebody. Would you want a surprise spoiled?
398
That soldiers do terrible things during wartime should not surprise us.
399
Al Qaeda operates by launching surprise attacks on civilian targets with the goal of massive casualties. Our only means for preventing future attacks, which could use WMDs, is by acquiring information that allows for pre-emptive action.
400
I often do things that surprise me, not to mention others.
401
I can’t control everything that’s said, but I’ve been around. Nothing will surprise me.
402
Every time something happens, whether I’ve won the most or lost the most, there’s always ‘oldest’ tied to it. It’s not a surprise anymore.
403
The biggest surprise to me is many members in Congress don’t actually work.
404
I’m sure it came as no surprise to my friends and family when I became an illustrator and then a writer because, from about the age of five, I was one of those children who always had his nose in a book.
405
When it comes to romance, I’m really simple. I am really a ‘dinner and a movie’ type of person, and I love food, so surprise me and order something different or adventurous when it comes to food, and I’m like a kid at Halloween.
406
Instead of fearing the unknown – all the bad that can happen – realize that good things can surprise you as well.
407
The prospect of ideological discrimination in higher education shouldn’t come as a surprise.
408
To me, all success is a delightful surprise, since one can absolutely never predict it.
409
So it won’t be a surprise when the Greek default actually happens and we expect it one way or the other to be relatively soon.
410
Sweet, loveable, and with every click revealing a new surprise, ‘Botanicula’ creates both a wonderful world where bees and twigs play in the universe and sets up a daring story of a group of unlikely heroes taking on a tree’s last hope of survival.
411
I have a lot of maneuvers in my back pocket, so to speak. And to me, the thing is to always surprise the audience so they’re always seeing something new, and not just get stuck in the same rut.
412
Close to the Edge, Red, One of a kind, Discipline, Earthworks, The Sound of Surprise, all seem to me to be albums that captured the essence of the intention.
413
I quite like the element of surprise, and as much as I have my ideas, I always appreciate ideas that come from other people as well, and I love the mystery of not knowing.
414
I like the busy-ness of office life. What I discovered, to my surprise, is that I love the solitary nature of writing. What happens is that you write when you’re ready.
415
Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn’t fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will – with luck – come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise.
416
She is like a monkey virus and will infect you and bleed you dry after you’ve given her too much personal information, and no reaction, word or deed from Courtney Love should surprise anyone.
417
I got nominated for a Tony, which was a complete surprise. It was an experience that I will always cherish.
418
We are often too late with our brilliance. We are on time delay. The only instant gratification comes in the form of potato chips. The rest will find us by surprise somewhere down the road maybe as we sleep and dream of other things.
419
We live in a time of short attention spans and long stories. The short attention spans are seen as inevitable, the consequence of living our lives in thrall to flickering streams of information. The long stories are the surprise, as is the persistence of the audience for them.
420
Kids ask me questions. You’d think after doing this for four years, I would have heard every single question anyone could think of to ask, but no, every time, they surprise me, they ask me something I never thought of before.
421
A good, sympathetic review is always a wonderful surprise.
422
On 6 October 1973, the Yom Kippur war broke out between a coalition of Arab states and Israel. At 6 A.M. that morning, Kissinger, asleep in the Waldorf, was taken by surprise by the Arab attack – as were the CIA and the rest of the world.
423
I always respond to characters who have depth. I’m always interested in those people. They’re the ones who surprise you.
424
I think all human beings can surprise themselves when they are in situations where they are tested. That’s when you see your true character coming out, and I was definitely tested.
425
It’s like a cast of actors; you’re all working together closely under pressure to produce something everyday. And when we put up an issue, it’s like the curtains opening on a new play. I really like that daily sense of surprise.
426
Our human face happens to be one of the most powerful channels that we all use to communicate social and emotional states: everything from enjoyment, surprise, empathy, and curiosity.
427
You have to surprise opponents, keep them guessing. Doing the same thing over and over again without variation will not work.
428
Every time I write something, I think, this is the most offensive thing I will ever write. But no. I always surprise myself.
429
I miss the generation of actors such as John Mills, where it doesn’t surprise you at all when he crops up in a film tap-dancing.
430
It’s no surprise that work is good for us – the financial security of regular pay and the social and health benefits of being employed keep us healthy and alert. But some people who want to work find it nearly impossible get their foot on the ladder.
431
See, the SAG awards caught me totally by surprise.
432
No surprise that, as companies have adopted social media en masse, demand for software and applications to manage and monitor social use has exploded.
433
My advice is don’t keep asking yourself if you can do something. Just get out there and do it. You can really surprise yourself.
434
Luckily, with ‘The Collector’ the first time around, it really took off in the DVD world and foreign, so it was just a pleasant surprise that a couple of years later there we were, doing it again.
435
The idea behind a dish – the delight and the surprise – makes a difference. Great literature surprises and delights, and provokes us. It isn’t just ‘Here’s the facts – boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.’ It’s how you tell it.
436
Wonder is from surprise, and surprise stops with experience.
437
One year, my parents hired someone in the village to dress up as Krampus for a surprise visit to our home – and they regretted it for ever. I went to the door and this huge creature was standing there. I think I passed out.
438
Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.
439
What gives me the most hope every day is God’s grace; knowing that his grace is going to give me the strength for whatever I face, knowing that nothing is a surprise to God.
440
I don’t tell everyone my life history because if everyone knows your inside-leg measurement, how can you surprise them?
441
My favorite magazine is the ‘Harvard Business Review.’ If someone sat across from me in a restaurant and didn’t know me, that might surprise them.
442
The Gospel of Judas really has been a surprise in many ways. For one thing, there’s no other text that suggests that Judas Iscariot was an intimate, trusted disciple, one to whom Jesus revealed the secrets of the kingdom, and that conversely, the other disciples were misunderstanding what he meant by the gospel.
443
People aren’t expecting me to look how I do. But that’s one of the main reasons it works so well: the surprise factor.
444
The first book was a life story that I was hesitant to write anyway because I didn’t feel like I had a real life story… It was a surprise hit.
445
I think Ancelotti really likes London and he likes the way football is played over here. That doesn’t surprise me because, after Italy, if you come here, you really enjoy the culture.
446
Since we began Daft Punk we go from surprise to surprise.
447
Hatred of the mother is familiar, but the mother’s hatred still comes as a surprise.
448
What a lovely surprise to finally discover how unlonely being alone can be.
449
The bewildering success of my books continues to surprise me.
450
The element of surprise – where you think you know where a joke is going, and then you’re wrong. Those are my favorite kind of jokes.
451
When you need a good laugh, do you reach for a book? I don’t. I expect books to move me deeply and submerge me in another reality. So when a novel makes me roar with laughter, it’s always a delightful surprise.
452
Most jokes are based on surprise. They take advantage of a confusion of language, or a twist in logic, or a contradiction of some perceived truth, or sometimes just saying something so shocking and offensive that the audience will gasp and then (hopefully) guffaw.
453
It is no surprise that animation is Hollywood’s most successful and innovative genre.
454
The whole rise of new adult contemporary music and smooth jazz was a nice surprise.
455
In every interview, when they would ask me who should be a judge, I would always say Harry Connick, Jr., so I think I had something to do with him becoming a judge! He has a blunt, dry sense of humor. You never know if he’s joking or not, and I think that’s going to catch a lot of people by surprise.
456
When you talk about avant-garde cuisine, the surprise factor is really important. For example, I love looking at blogs and the photos, but I’m not that keen on other people taking photos of my dishes.
457
With ‘Outlander,’ definitely the book fans were at the door, ready to go, as soon as we started. But it felt like it kind of crossed over into more of a general audience rapidly. That did surprise me – I thought it would take longer for general audiences to come around.
458
My Marathi is indeed very bad and whenever I try to call my friends Sandeep Kulkarni or Sayaji Shinde, they immediately recognise my weird accent and all my efforts to surprise them go down the drain.
459
I wasn’t expecting to be traded, so it definitely was a surprise to me. But things happen in this league so I just decided to take in stride and start a new journey in Milwaukee.
460
Well the beauty of ‘Iyanla: Fix My Life’ is that men are in every show. To our surprise, some of the deepest healing demonstrations have been with the men – the sons, the fathers, the husbands – because they agree to participate with the wife or the daughter or whatever it is we are looking at, and it is there.
461
Like anyone who records music or writes a song, I thought, ‘Wouldn’t that be cool if someday I were able to do this for a living?’ But it was such a fluke, and it really all took me by surprise and I just held on for dear life. I really wasn’t prepared. I really went into it naively with no experience.
462
You know, this might surprise people, but what I really want and what I’m really working toward is a Chanel suit. I’d really like to have one that I could wear forever – a really classic one.
463
Groupon as a company – it’s built into the business model – is about surprise. A new deal that surprises you every day. We’ve carried that over to our brand, in the writing and the marketing that we do, and in the internal corporate culture.
464
Occasionally, you get a nice surprise when someone covers your song in an extraordinary way.
465
When we wrote ‘Avenue Q,’ we worked hard to create something that could be funny and satirical but also had some surprise moments of heart, moments when the music itself could become a central player and create something sweet and moving.
466
I’ve always had volume on my side: the big-voice-in-a-small-package thing. I surprise people.
467
For me, if you distill comedy down, it is surprise and the unexpected. That has to be it on its most base level, in any form.
468
I’ve only ever had surprises. My whole career’s a surprise!
469
Shortly thereafter, some friends encouraged me to try out for the Miss South Carolina World beauty pageant. To my surprise, I won – and was sent to New York City to compete nationally.
470
Mystery is at the heart of creativity. That, and surprise.
471
Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you’d think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise.
472
For me, the biggest surprise? I had no idea how worldwide the fandom for ‘The Witcher’ was.
473
Labels and classifications of any type are not law, nor are they written in stone. It’s up to us to be aware of this and confront it and break through it by doing things that shock and surprise people because they thought we could never achieve at that level.
474
People show surprise that I have interests outside my political career. There is subtle surprise, for example, that I would be interested in a recipe.
475
My entry into the field of hydrogen came as a great surprise. President Bush of the United States was interested in hydrogen for energy applications, and I was asked to chair a committee on hydrogen for the Department of Energy.
476
The most dangerous age is 14. If you know any teenagers, this might not come as a surprise, but research has confirmed that risk-taking peaks during this exact moment in mid-adolescence.
477
I’ve been asking my partner for a dog for a while and she kept saying no. She was obviously keeping it for a birthday surprise, and when I came home from Rotherham, Hugo was sat on the sofa waiting for me. It was a really nice surprise.
478
I’m always looking for a way to surprise audiences. That’s, I feel, my job as a director. I felt that Amy Adams playing a tough woman in ‘The Fighter’ was a surprise. People saw her as a princess.
479
Humor has to surprise us; otherwise, it isn’t funny. It’s a death knell for a writer to be labeled a humorist because then it’s not a surprise anymore.
480
People don’t think their dreams amount to much, but when I ask them to examine them for common themes, they surprise themselves at how accurate they are! They see that their dreams have value.
481
I never rule anything in or out; life can surprise you.
482
The world of fashion and fine arts in New York really took me by surprise, and photography has helped me through a period of personal turmoil. I am glad when people like my portfolio, but its aim is – or was – to keep me at peace.
483
I accept roles which are challenging and surprise me, inducing hard work and thinking. Such opportunities are few and far between but when they come I grab them.
484
Death never takes the wise man by surprise, he is always ready to go.
485
I listen to a lot of alternative types of music: I listen to a lot of Chinese music, I listen to a lot of Asian music. It might surprise you, but I listen to a lot of Arabic music. And I don’t care – music is music.
486
It’s not a surprise to us that every large technology company is trying to build an offering like AWS’ because it’s such a good value proposition for customers.
487
President Lyndon Johnson was very, very unpredictable. We never knew for sure what he is going to do next, and he preferred to have it that way; if he could do something as a complete surprise, that was his preference.
488
As congressional Republicans and the Trump administration continue to attack the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), it came as no surprise that the House voted on two bills that would weaken emissions standards and, as a result, put our public health at risk.
489
Given what the media have put the country through this past decade, it must come as a surprise to most Americans that the press has a code of ethics.
490
Acting in film, you know, I hear all the time, people say ‘You did so much better than I thought you would.’ So there’s an added element of surprise in film, different than in music.
491
It was a big surprise for me when they asked me to bat at three. That is a big thing. I was focussed on playing the situation. You need to be open anyway if you are playing for a team like India.
492
Now we’re e-mailing and tweeting and texting so much, a phone call comes as a fresh surprise. I get text messages on my cell phone all day long, and it warbles to alert me that someone has sent me a message on Facebook or a reply or direct message on Twitter, but it rarely ever rings.
493
A study last year showed that the page you turn to first in the newspaper can be a predictor of how long you will live. No surprise, turning first to the Comics Pages prolongs your life.
494
There are very few things that surprise me.
495
As a footballer, you have to be confident you can win all the time so it does not come as a surprise.
496
One of the reasons why I love acting is my obsession with human emotion and faces and expressions – no surprise, then, that I usually end up painting faces. But I haven’t done a self-portrait. I’d be too scared.
497
After I found that I had become an actor, slightly to my surprise, I did have some insecurity, and I did take some rather strange acting classes at a place called The Actor’s Studio in London. I don’t think they did me any good at all.
498
I trust my recovering peers completely. I’ll occasionally look sideways at them because they’re addicts but it would break my heart and surprise me to find out that any of these people were lying. Still, addiction is cunning and baffling and you never know.
499
I don’t think it was a surprise that I ended up as an actor, and it was anything but a disappointment.
500
Limited points of view let the writer dispense – and the reader gather – information from various corners of the story. It all becomes a kind of dance, with the writer guiding the reader through the various twists and turns. The challenge is keeping readers in step, while still managing to surprise.
501
I’m a huge fan of what Marvel did, it’s no surprise for anyone to know that as a child I was a huge fan of comics.
502
I had soaked up all of these ideas about what it meant to be a creative person from media and culture. And I had this idea in my head that if this was your calling it was supposed to be fun. It was supposed to feel good to wrestle with a blank page. And imagine my surprise when it wasn’t fun at all.
503
An important part of any good mystery story like ‘Original Sin’ is that it’s not just a game of ‘Clue’ with surprise after surprise after surprise, but the goal is to tell a story in the midst of that. Even once you know the solution to the mysteries, it’s far from the whole story.
504
The best actors just stay in the moment,and whatever happens in the scene is a genuine surprise. You really do not know what’s going to happen next. But living that out in life is very dangerous because it throws you into a place where you don’t know if you’re going to survive.
505
There will be, I think, an attempt to grasp again the surprise and accidents of nature and a more intimate and sympathetic study of its moods, together with a renewed wonder and humility on the part of such as are still capable of these basic reactions.
