Surprise

Famous quotes containing the word surprise:

    None of us know all the potentialities that slumber in the spirit of the population, or all the ways in which that population can surprise us when there is the right interplay of events.
    Václav Havel (b. 1936)

    Extreme patience and persistence are required,
    Yet everybody succeeds at this before being handed
    The surprise box lunch of the rest of his life.
    John Ashbery (b. 1927)

    Our books are false by being fragmentary: their sentences are bon mots, and not parts of natural discourse; childish expressions of surprise or pleasure in nature; or, worse, owing a brief notoriety to their petulance, or aversion from the order of nature,—being some curiosity or oddity, designedly not in harmony with nature, and purposely framed to excite surprise, as jugglers do by concealing their means.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)