Quotes About Surprise

All the parts I've enjoyed playing the most I didn't know about until they appeared, or it was something I read and fell in love with.

ironia este însu?irea fundamental? a providen?ei

Novelty is both delightful and deceptive.

Let a thing be but a sort of punctual surprise, like the first cache of violets in March, let it be delicate, painted and gratuitous, hinting that the Creator is solely occupied with aesthetic considerations, and combines disparate objects simply because they look so well together, and that thing will admirably fill the role of a flower.

The mountains will be in labor, and a ridiculous mouse will be brought forth.

Serendipity… you will understand it better by the derivation than by the definition. I once read a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of…. Now do you understand serendipity?

This particular blunder is known as deus ex machina , which is French for "Are you fucking kidding me?

Keep the reader guessing about where events are happening, what historical period the characters live in, and whether at any given moment they are jogging, taking a steam bath, or dangling from a precipice. Try to create an absolute nothingness in which, from time to time, a phone receiver or a pair of pert breasts materializes as the protagonist forms the intention to use them.

A lot happens by accident in poetry.

Behind every successful man stands a surprised mother-in-law.

She kissed me. She kissed me. What I mean is, I was standing there, lips puckered, brain puckered, and she just stepped up and threw her tongue into my mouth. For a moment, I thought maybe she'd tripped on a floorboard and stuck out her tongue as a reflex - but that didn't seem very likely somehow, and anyway, once she'd got her balance back, wouldn't she have put her tongue away again? No, she was definitely kissing me.

It was like suddenly discovering a family of otters in one of your shoes. If you've ever done that.

She was having fun, but her fun emerged from misery. Fun isn't pleasure, it turns out. Fun is the feeling of finding something new in a familiar situation. Fun almost demands boredom: you need the sense that nothing good could possibly arise from an experience in order for the experience of finding something there to smolder with the hot pleasure of surprise. Likewise

I jerked the blankets right back off her, and there she was with her nightdress up around her neck. It was a shock to me that, her starting to look like a woman." [Jimmy about Molly]

Xervish Flydd, to Nish. 'You took your bloody time, Nish. I expected you nine years ago.

When he came to, the eels were still being removed from him and Anvar was congratulating one of the rivermen. The man had smashed open a barrel of eels and covered both dwarf and zombie with them.

Only one man was not surprised. He was not surprised because he had no concept of normality that the events in Neu Ulmsbad Square could violate.

The past is like that. When it finally taps you on the shoulder, it's never the thing you thought it to be.

Acknowledgements Reading Group Notes Timeline About the Author By Ian Rankin Copyright Serendipity. According to the dictionary, it means the ability to make 'happy chance finds'. Serendip was the old name for Ceylon. Horace Walpole is credited with coining the term, after the fairy tale 'The Three Princes of Serendip', whose titular heroes were always stumbling across things they weren't looking for.

I went to the Oxford Bar first off, but they said they hardly see you these days. I'm at the age where nothing should surprise me, but

Woodwork creaks and out come the freaks, eh?

It was the laughter of birthdays, of money found in an old pocket.

Christ on a bike, Tony …

He had perfected the art of looking interested, and could grasp in surprise at any and every predictable punchline.