Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When I was a child I devoured every book I could get my hands on. I loved losing myself in colourful and dramatic stories - and my absolute favourite was 'Charlie And The Chocolate Factory.' Everything about it electrified me, and when I re-read Roald Dahl's books as an adult it surprised me.
As I've traveled around the country, it has surprised me how many times I've heard people in small businesses use that word 'saved.' I believe many small businesses would not have had access to credit and would not have survived without the $50 billion that we were able to put into the market.
One of the illusions that we live by is that we can really know anybody else, and we're often surprised by traits in people that we thought we knew very well. The struggle to overcome loneliness, which is sort of our universal burden, leads us to leap to conclusions about who other people are.
TED Women isn't championing a cause; it's surfacing and sharing some of the most important ideas of our time. Our focus is on women as change agents, innovators and idea champions, and I think people will be both inspired and surprised by the program. We're exploring some fascinating territory!
Napoleon's plan was for his army to arrive in Egypt not as conquerors but liberators. Landing in Aboukir Bay on July 1, 1798, the French captured Alexandria the next day, overcoming the surprised Mamelukes - the despotic local rulers - with a combination of modern artillery and infantry tactics.
The key is to constantly keep the audience surprised. If they feel like something is going to happen, or they think from an educational standpoint that something is about to happen because of all the moving parts, it is your job to break that expectation and show the audience something different.
I was surprised that when you get into electoral politics how scientific the analysis was in the electorate. You can identify on a state-by-state or district-by-district basis fundamental building blocks that behave in different ways. I was impressed in general with the sophistication of polling.
I went in for a checkup, and when my doctor had me stand on the scale, even he was surprised. Seeing that number (which I'll take to the grave) was a turning point. I knew I needed to make a change. I cut out white flour and starches and worked with my doctor and a nutritionist to develop a plan.
I seem to get into situations that make people laugh, but I don't consider myself that funny of a person. I'm not witty. I'm kind of slow in conversations. I'm not that articulate with jokes. The first time I made stuff and screened it for an audience, I was surprised what people were laughing at.
Friends frequently ask how I, given my politics, dealt with seeing my brother and his companion, Richard, together for the first time. They are surprised when I tell them it wasn't as unsettling as I had anticipated. Richard was smart, funny, kind, and clearly devoted to Curtis. They just clicked.
Commercials certainly pay more than films. I was pleasantly surprised at the profitability of commercials when I did my first ad for a popular soap brand years ago. I was paid a huge amount of money for a mere 30 seconds of screen presence. After that, ads have been a regular feature in my career.
Even the most cynical can hardly be surprised by the antics of Nixon and his accomplices as they are gradually revealed. It matters little, at this point, where the exact truth lies in the maze of perjury, evasion, and of contempt for the normal - hardly inspiring - standards of political conduct.
When I moved from Canada to Korea, I experienced a massive culture shock. I wasn't familiar with Korean culture at all and was very surprised at the hierarchical elements of Korean culture. However, at the time I was determined to succeed so I became a sponge and just soaked in everything I could.
I feel like people want to be surprised when they get out of the movies. They want something thrown at them they didn't expect. They want stuff that reminds them of the feelings that you get when you're watching art house movies but with the fun of like a big summer movie. That's the goal, I guess.
Some people might be surprised that 'Rambo's creator has a doctorate in American literature. One of my influences is Henry James, whose major theme is awareness. Whether I'm writing about military personnel, law enforcement, or De Quincey, the persistent theme is paying attention in a hostile world.
I have an appearance on a new TV show called 'Bar Karma' on Current TV. I had the most fun ever making this episode. I play someone with a multiple personality, and I think my fans will be surprised and get a real giggle out of it. It's a new model for TV in that it is interactive with the community.
It's hard to be surprised by a film. It's hard to be surprised by another actor or by a director when you've seen enough and been around. So when I am, or when I forget that I'm watching someone's movie, or when I don't know how someone made a certain turn that I didn't expect . . . You know, I'm in.
Thundercat, specifically, is insane. I'm always surprised at the things he comes up with when we're jamming out together. I gotta try to keep up with him and his ideas, be able to respond without speaking, and come through with some more music. He challenges me to keep it musical and not so computer.
When I had cancer, people were surprised at how cheerful and upbeat I was, but I couldn't let myself go to depression - to go there, that defeat would allow everything in. If you look too far into the abyss, you might never come out again. You can stand on the abyss and peep but not give in to sadness.
I've been surprised at how much an unknown like myself can accomplish just by reaching out to people and pleading my case. Quotes for the book cover, reviews and interviews, readings and radio appearances - all this by simply moving ahead and making contact with folks I thought might enjoy the writing.
I've been really pleasantly surprised by 'Guardians of the Galaxy.' I'd never really heard of that gang before, that comic series before. And I think when you go into those, watching those sort of films, you watch them with no expectation as well, so you're always kind of pleasantly surprised, I think.
Octavia Spencer rocks. But just as a human being, she's so down-to-earth. Talk about being pleasantly surprised. You walk onto set, and she's making these jokes, and she's playing around with the cast and the crew, and she invited all to her house for a dinner party. She's just a genuinely good person.
Emphasize your strengths on your resume, in your cover letters and in your interviews. It may sound obvious, but you'd be surprised how many people simply list everything they've ever done. Convey your passion and link your strengths to measurable results. Employers and interviewers love concrete data.
I love going to theatres and seeing honest little indie films I know nothing about... being surprised by a beautiful film I had no expectations about but just got lost in. I'd like to do more well-written indies. I don't know exactly what my dream role will be yet, but it's somewhere within that realm.
I never thought about having a daughter, and then I had a daughter, and it was a remarkable thing. It was very different from having a son and your response to it. With a son, it's much more complex. And it's probably because of my stuff in the past. With a daughter, I was surprised at how simple it is.
There's no artist in this world that doesn't enjoy the dream that if they have bad reviews now, the story of Keats can redeem them, in their fantasy or imagination, in the future. I think Keats' poem 'Endymion' is a really difficult poem, and I'm not surprised that a lot of people pulled it apart in a way.
I was totally surprised by the spread of the legalization of same-sex marriage. In just my lifetime we have gone from a taboo to even talk about homosexuality, to the sanction by governments of homosexual marriage. Few such large social considerations have ever before been turned over in such a short time.
I don't know why people are so obsessed with finding out stuff before the movie comes out. It's so much more fun to just go. I mean, I don't do that. I don't go looking for stuff that I'm interested in, you know, to try and find out pictures and what the movie's about. It's so much more fun to be surprised.
Some people do stage and film. Some people are film actors, and some people are stage actors. I'm quite sure that any of the actors who did the original production of 'August' could have done the film of 'August.' I don't think any of them were particularly surprised when they didn't wind up doing the film.
My first job now is as a mother, everything else is secondary. My kids understand that I am an actress, and they are always so surprised to hear my voice on a cartoon character, or see my face on a video box. If it ever gets to be too much though, the career and the kids, I will simply set the career aside.
I'm a fairly ordinary person - a lifelong reader, a former software engineer, and former math teacher. I come from a wonderful family of teachers, musicians, librarians, and engineers. I think I surprised them as well as my friends and coworkers when I took up writing as a hobby and let it take over my life!
Concrete you can mold, you can press it into - after all, you haven't any straight lines in your body. Why should we have straight lines in our architecture? You'd be surprised when you go into a room that has no straight line - how marvelous it is that you can feel the walls talking back to you, as it were.
I was pleasantly surprised with 'Salvage.' I went to Australia and New Zealand for the novel and met a lot of people who had experienced the earthquakes in Christchurch. They responded very strongly to the book because they had been through these natural disasters and were trying to figure out how to rebuild.
I am not expecting anyone to feel sorry for me, but when friends ask how it feels to be a debut novelist who has also been long listed for the Man Booker prize, I have to admit that my response has confused me. I am so overwhelmed, so delighted, so honoured and so surprised, I have come out in a violent cold.
We want to see ourselves - but differently. We want to see these dream versions of ourselves. We want to be surprised; we want to be entertained. I think primarily, especially in this country, we ask that movies entertain us, which seems to be something they're less and less likely to do on a continual basis.
Those who closely watched the campaign should not be surprised by Obama's hostility toward Israel, given his relations with pro-Palestinian, virulent critics of Israel and his voluntary membership in Reverend Wright's decidedly anti-Semitic church. Furthermore, his campaign website featured anti-Semitic posts.
If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my entire life, I am most surprised by those moments when I have felt as if the sentences, dreams, and pages that have made me so ecstatically happy have not come from my own imagination - that another power has found them and generously presented them to me.
I'm an untrained musician. Untrained musicians don't really have any music theory, they don't have a lot of rules. We break the rules, but it's mostly because we don't know what the rules are. It's easy for us to go to certain places, so I'm not surprised that a lot of people were amused by my songwriting style.
The enemies of acting are mood and attitude and other general homogenized disruptive entities. Whereas acting is about action - doing - and unless you can figure out a way to craft in an imaginative reality to which you don't submit, you're going to be out of control. You'll flip out. The job is to be surprised.
I actually hope people don't react to 'Impossible' in a way where they think it's terribly retro. The plot needed to do what it needed to do. But I'm a little surprised to find myself looking a little bit like an advocate of teen marriage. It takes some exceptional circumstances for that to be a reasonable idea.
We've always had this experience that things take long, but I'm 100% convinced that our principles will in the end prevail. No one knew how the Cold War would end at the time, but it did end. This is within our living experience... I'm surprised at how fainthearted we sometimes are and how quickly we lose courage.
On the last drafts, I focus on the words themselves, including the rub of vowels and consonants, stressed and unstressed syllables. Yet even at this stage I'm often surprised. A different ending or a new character shows up and I'm back to where I began, letting the story happen, just trying to stay out of the way.
My sister is a good story of resiliency. She had a full ride at UC Davis, but she left school to go to the Philippines - and then she decided to go back to school in her 40s, which surprised me. She went to UC Berkeley, and I think she was one of two African Americans in her class at Haas. She's really impressive.
I'm not surprised 'The Avengers' has such enduring popularity, because it was a groundbreaking series that changed television. It was the first show that put its leading man and leading lady on an equal footing and showed a woman fighting and kicking and throwing men around. That was a radical departure in its time.
The best compliment came from Knopf's Sonny Mehta. We were at lunch in New York with my editor, Gary Fisketjon, it was my first time meeting Sonny, and after ordering our food, he turned to me and said, 'Adam, I read 'Mr. Peanut' in two days; every page surprised me, and that, I can assure you, doesn't happen often.'
People are really surprised when they meet me that I'm a recluse. People think I'm very gregarious and outgoing - and I am - I'm thinking about writing a book about it called 'The Gregarious Recluse.' How the more that you put me out there in front of audiences, the more that when I have down time I have to disappear.
There is already good organisation at Chelsea, but at Milan, it was about prevention rather than treatment. We want to integrate some of the things we had at Milan here. Some people are surprised when they hear that we solved David Beckham's back problem by fixing his teeth, for example, but we will look at everything.
The world of 'Terra Nova' as we joined it... there is a certain amount of prosperity there, and in fact I would say that I was a bit surprised when I first got there to see how it had all developed and how sophisticated the colony was - I had envisioned it being a bit more Swiss Family Robinson, but that wasn't my call.
People quote lines to me all the time. I'm always surprised - everybody has a favorite movie, and they're always different. I'm always shocked. People stop me on the street and throw lines at me from 'Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight' and 'Deep Space Nine.' 'Shawshank' happens a lot because they play it so much on TV.
I like what I see now in China, but I think the Japanese are a step ahead into craziness and weirdness. I go to galleries there that are the size of a New York elevator, and every time I'm surprised by the amazing things I find. I really hope I'll be able to promote some of these artists, to show their work in the West.