Surprise Quotes
More Surprise Quotes
If you go down in the woods today You're sure of a big Surprise If you down in the woods today You'd better go in disguise. For every Bear that ever there was Will gather there for certain because, Today's the day theTeddy Bears have their Picnic.
— 1932 'The Teddy Bears' Picnic' (with James B Kennedy).
Texture and pattern should function as a Surprise.
robert denning— Patricia Volk, "The Sweet Smell of Excess", The New York Times (October 8, 2006; retrieved October 4, 2007).
This is not the way it has been done. We would never Surprise each other ... It's not to say that there's not important information that we could discuss or would be discussed in secret or closed session, but I'm astounded by this. I don't really know what the tenor of this is, what is the justification for it and why this extreme approach was used.
trent lott— The Associated Press, November 1, 2005.
Nobody will finish above us in the league. It wouldn't Surprise me if we were to go unbeaten for the whole of the season.
arsène wenger— Before the 2002-03 season commenced, (2002).
He [Julius Caesar] learned that Alexander , having completed nearly all his conquests by the time he was thirty-two years old, was at an utter loss to know what he should do during the rest of his life, whereat Augustus expressed his Surprise that Alexander did not regard it as a greater task to set in order the empire which he had won than to win it.
augustus— Plutarch
Pearl Harbor is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on December 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a Surprise attack on an American love triangle. Its centerpiece is 40 minutes of redundant special effects, surrounded by a love story of stunning banality. The film has been directed without grace, vision, or originality, and although you may walk out quoting lines of dialog, it will not be because you admire them.
roger ebert— Review of Pearl Harbor (25 May 2001)
Today millions of people are living who will never do it again. Millions are being born for the first time–and millions are doing nothing because it’s the best offer they’ve had this week. … It is for these people and many others that the Surprise Party is conceived and desecrated, founded upon the principle that everybody is just as good as anybody else, even though they aren’t quite so smart.
gracie allen— Ch. 5 : Issues and how to pick them
How he lies in his rights of a man! Death has done all death can. And absorbed in the new life he leads, He recks not, he heeds Nor his wrong nor my vengeance; both strike On his senses alike, And are lost in the solemn and strange Surprise of the change.
Robert Browning— After.
Life is a great Surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
vladimir nabokov— 1962 Pale Fire.
Art must take reality by Surprise.
— 1958 Writers atWork.
To many Americans, whose only knowledge of the North Star State is that it is intensely cold and populated by Swedes and Holsteins, it will come as a Surprise to wake up one morning in 2004 and read in the newspaper, "Half of U.S. Economy Now in Hands of Minnesota".
garrison keillor— "Minnesota's Sensible Plan, TIME (11 September 1995)
Ah, my brother, it is a far harder thing, and it is afar higher proof of a thorough-going, persistent, Christian principle woven into the very texture of my soul, to go on plodding and patient, never taken by Surprise by any small temptation, than to gather into myself the strength which God has given me, and, expecting some great storm to come down upon me, to stand fast, and let it rage. It is a great deal easier to die once for Christ than to live always for Him.
alexander maclaren— P. 109. (Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895))
A story to me means a plot where there is some Surprise… Because that is how life is — full of surprises.
Isaac Bashevis Singer— The New York Times (26 November 1978)
The people who run the international tests told us, "the biggest predictor of student success is choice." Nations that "attach the money to the kids" and thereby allow parents to choose between different public and private schools have higher test scores. This should be no Surprise; competition makes us better.
john stossel— Stossel, John (2006-07-26). "Smearing Education Choice". Townhall.com. Retrieved on 2007-09-24.
The first thing I ever thought of when I thought of Buffy , the movie, was the little...blonde girl who goes into a dark alley and gets killed, in every horror movie. The idea of Buffy was to subvert that idea, that image, and create someone who was a hero where she had always been a victim. That element of Surprise ... genre-busting is very much at the heart of both the movie and the series.
joss whedon— Welcome to the Hellmouth (1997) DVD Commentary
Fate has a way of circling back on a man, and taking him by Surprise. A man sees things differently at different times in his life. This town didn't seem the same now that he was older.
— John August, Big Fish, based on Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions (1998) by Daniel Wallace, by "Edward Bloom".
The fool of nature stood with stupid eyes And gaping mouth, that testified Surprise.
john dryden— Line 107. (Cymon and Iphigenia)
A depressing number of people seem to process everything literally. They are to wit as a blind man is to a forest, able to find every tree, but each one coming as a Surprise.
roger ebert— First published in the "Movie Answer Man" column (18 September 2005)
There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of Surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.
Henry James— "Anthony Trollope," Century Magazine (July 1883); reprinted in Partial Portraits (1888)
From a town known as Wheeling, West Virginia Rode a boy with a six-gun in his hand And his daring life of crime made him a legend in his time East and west of the Rio Grande. Well, he started with a bank in Colorado In the pocket of his vest a Colt he hid. And his age and his size took the teller by Surprise, And the word spread of Billy the Kid.
Billy Joel— The Ballad of Billy the Kid
When I was 4 years old ... I dreamt that I'd been eaten by a wolf, and to my great Surprise I was in the wolf's stomach and not in heaven.
bertrand russell— BBC interview on "Face to Face" (1959); The Listener, Vol. 61 (1959), p. 503.
Respect was mingled with Surprise, And the stern joy which warriors feel In foeman worthy of their steel.
walter scott— Canto V, stanza 10.
If you don't know anything about computers, just remember that they are machines that do exactly what you tell them but often Surprise you in the result.
Richard Dawkins— Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (1986), III, p.50 ISBN 0-393-31570-3
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth's superb Surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind
Emily Dickinson— Poem 1129: Tell all the Truth but tell it slant —
It may come as a Surprise to the T-oriented analyst that the typical organization chart is a poor guide regarding the locus of power in organizations: Real power does not lie in documents and memos outlining your terms of reference and area of jurisdiction: it lies in what you can achieve in practice.
— Harold Adrian Linstone (1994) The Challenge of the 21st Century. p. 99
As soon as we started programming, we found to our Surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.
— Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949 [ ]
You Surprise me yet again. I'm a better teacher... than I thought...
— Who: Master Sun Li
— Notes: The player is playing the role of his student, whom he had raised to defeat Emperor Sun Hai so that he could take power. He earlier remarked that he did not intend to help others surpass him if the player chose "You are a great teacher. Your skill was wasted on evil ambition."
