Quotes About Surprise

But it was on the occasions that he did the unexpected that he felt the most alive. Time seemed to stop; hours slowed to minutes, separated into seconds, halted into pictures. Still life images of emotion.

So, you never can tell what will happen when you learn to play the harmonica.

an ending must be both "inevitable and unexpected.

The storyteller leads us into expectation, makes us think we understand, then cracks open reality

Turning Points fail when we overprepare the obvious and underprepare the unusual.

They think life is A, B, C, D, E. That's just when life likes to turn you around, kick you in the butt, and grin: "Not today, my friend. Today it's E, D, C, B, A. Sorry." PRINCIPLE

Hay títulos que uno ha evitado durante años y años, viéndolos reaparecer cada tanto. Llega un día en que, sin una razón aparente, nos aventuramos a comprar el libro. Finalmente uno lo abre y descubre que es del todo distinto de lo que habíamos pensado. O bien se constata que es como si ya lo hubiéramos leído -y entonces las razones para evitarlo eran incuestionablemente sólidas.

The thing that surprised

My kind [vampires] does not surprise easily, he said. You surprised me, this morning. I have thus used up my full quota of shock and consternation for some interval. I stared at him. You made a *joke*. I have heard this kind of thing may happen...

What was new was the fact that, despite my heart doing its fight-or-flight, help-we're-prey-and-HEY-STUPID-THAT'S-A-VAMPIRE number, I was glad to see him. Ridiculous but true. Scary but true.

She poured the water, arranged some bread near enough the embers to scorch but not catch fire, and looked up at Little John. She was so accustomed to his step, to his bulk, that it took a moment to notice his face; and when she did . . . It was, she thought, rather like the moment it took to realize one had cut one's finger as one stared dumbly at the first drop of blood on the knife-blade. You know it is going to hurt quite a lot in a minute.

There was something very odd about the carpet this morning… More hedgehogs? Many more hedgehogs? Positively a lake of hedgehogs?

Oh, big surprise. Something wasn't going to be easy. I tried to rouse myself, to react. I failed.

The difficulty with von Falkenhayn's original concept was that since the city had to be defended, the French had made it defensible. Once the Germans had lost the advantage of surprise and failed to take Verdun in the first few days, the French were fully alert to the threat and responded to it with increasing force, more weaponry, and not a little skill.

Life has bigger plans for you than you can possibly know.

Like when everything flipped upside down and the scream of metal on metal exploded the silence and the world churned around me, ground over sky over ground over sky, and then, with a thunderous crack and a crunching of glass and steel, a twisted roof crushing me into a gutted floor, ground, I wasn't surprised.

You see. No shock. No engulfment. No tearing assunder. What you feared would come like an explosion is like a whisper. What you thought was the end is the beginning.

My wife and I were happy for twenty years. Then we met.

A girl phoned me the other day and said, 'Come on over. There's nobody home.' I went over. Nobody was home.

The very fact of snow is such an amazement.

Fate is not merely knocking on the door, it has entered with a SWAT team and is banging their heads together and administering poppers.

Another of Keaton's strategies was to avoid anticipation. Instead of showing you what was about to happen, he showed you what was happening; the surprise and the response are both unexpected, and funnier. He also gets laughs by the application of perfect logic.

Karl Malden once said the hardest thing he ever had to do as an actor was act as if he didn't know he was about to be hit in the head with a beer can.

We'd had a revelation. This was the direction American movies should take: into idiosyncratic characters, into dialogue with an ear for the vulgar and the literate, into a plot free to surprise us about the characters, into an existential ending not required to be happy.