"Life, if you live it right, keeps surprising you, and the thing that keeps surprising you the mostâ€¦is yourself"

--

Source : William Deresiewicz (2011). “A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter”, p.74, Penguin

William Deresiewicz

#Surprising Quotes

“A specter is haunting the cinema: the specter of narrative. If that apparition is an Angel, we must embrace it; and if it is a Devil, then we must cast it out. But we cannot know what it is until we have met it face to face.”
“Letâ€™s never forget that whatever brilliant ideas you have or hear, that the opposite may also be true.”
“We may be a nation of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans, but first and foremost we are all human beings and Americans.”

Source : Emanuel Cleaver DNC speech, www.politico.com. September 05, 2009.
“Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals.”

Source : "Fictional character: Michael Arnold Travis". O Lucky Man!, www.imdb.com. 1973.
“If we carry on filling up the calendar, we keep on pushing the athlete, we shorten the athletes longevity. The risk is to shorten a career that could have lasted 10 years because the athlete is burnt out.”
“The audience got jaded, they want a hit, they want a big success, and so you don't want to experiment because you say, well, I'll disappoint the audience, they may not like it, I better do something that I think is more commercial.”
“It always struck Fire, the physical affection between these siblings, who as often as not were at each other's throats over one thing or another. She liked the way the four of them shifted and changed shape, bumping and clanging against one another, sharpening each other's edges and then smoothing them down again, and somehow always finding the way to fit together.”
“You can't even imagine how it felt to have a cassette that you could take with you with a microphone so you could put down an idea and not have to hum it a million times to remember what it was.”

You may also like:

David Brooks
Commentator
Debby Applegate
Historian
Edward Tufte
Statistician
Harold Bloom
Literary critic
Jane Austen
Novelist
John Hollander
Poet
Peter Salovey
Psychologist
Steven Pinker
Psychologist
Timothy Dwight IV
Author