Surprise

Famous quotes containing the word surprise:

    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)

    Neither a work of nature nor one of art we get to know when they have been finished; we must surprise them in the process of being created so as to understand them to some degree.
    Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)

    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)