Top 44 Startling Quotes

Above all, a well-imagined story is organized around extraordinary human behaviors and unexpected and startling events, which help illuminate the commonplace and the ordinary.

As any editor will tell you, startling newsroom revelations are generally met with queries about where the information came from and how the reporter got it. Seriously startling revelations are followed by the vetting of libel lawyers.

The love of their country is with them only a mode of flattering its master; as soon as they think that master can no longer hear, they speak of everything with a frankness which is the more startling because those who listen to it become responsible.

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming of themselves like grass.

It is a startling and solemnizing fact that even as late as the twentieth century, the Great Command of Jesus Christ to carry the Gospel to all mankind is still so largely unfulfilled.

When you look at the startling ruins of Nuremberg, you are looking at a result of the war. When you look at the prisoners on view in the courthouse, you are looking at 22 of the causes.

Emily Dickinson has haunted my life – her poems, her persona, all the tales about her solitude. Ever since I discovered her in the seventh grade, I’ve had a crush on that spinster in white, who had such a heroic and startling inner landscape of her own.

So many other countries have had female leaders, in fact the U.S. ranks 61st in female representation in government and I think it is startling and sign of a change that needs to be made.

‘Suttree’ is a fat one, a book with rude, startling power and a flood of talk. Much of it takes place on the Tennessee River, and Cormac McCarthy, who has written ‘The Orchard Keeper’ and other novels, gives us a sense of river life that reads like a doomed ‘Huckleberry Finn.’

Truth is more peculiar than fiction. Life is really a startling place.

It’s as if inside the White House the belief in Obama’s inspirational charisma is still such that every time the ugliness of brute politics intrudes, it’s a startling revelation.

You know it’s always amazed me – I think the most startling thing that’s happened in the last couple of decades is that there is no sort of objective reporting anymore.

Here’s a startling fact: in the 45 years since the introduction of the automated teller machine, those vending machines that dispense cash, the number of human bank tellers employed in the United States has roughly doubled, from about a quarter of a million to a half a million.

Startling, and alarming to many, is the conclusion that follows from these data that if all people were treated the same, most average race differences would not disappear.

A tree growing out of the ground is as wonderful today as it ever was. It does not need to adopt new and startling methods.

The great thing about novels is that you can be as unshy as you want to be. I’m very polite in person. I don’t want to talk about startling or upsetting things with people.

I know that my image and my clothing and my output are very colorful and can be arresting and startling in some respects. That is the nature of my work, but I am a simple farm boy, and I am very calm by nature.

I think about my mother every day. But usually the thoughts are fleeting – she crosses my mind like a spring cardinal that flies past the edge of your eye: startling, luminous, lovely… gone.

Taken as a whole, consumer technologies have made startling advances, but they still are not as easy to use as they should be.

I have found in experiments, people become used to the robots. The less startling they become, the more commonplace they get. If these robots do become commonplace, then that uncanny effect will go away.

I was horrified to find out that a startling percentage of women, even in Bengaluru, do not go out or wash their hair during their periods.

The United States, to state the obvious, is greatly concerned by the startling number of unaccompanied minors that – children and teenagers who are making a very perilous journey through Central America to reach the United States.

New York is this cacophony – a collection of radical differences, an agreement of non sequiturs. The diversity and intensity are startling.

Any startling piece of work has a subversive element in it, a delicious element often. Subversion is only disagreeable when it manifests in political or social activity.

On one of my last days at school, the headmaster said I would either end up in prison or become a millionaire. That was quite a startling prediction, but in some respects, he was right on both counts!

My memoirs were written, and a portion of them already in the hands of the publishers, when the startling news came which has thrilled all Europe and filled her inhabitants with horror – the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States.

Being born in Cuba, a country where freedom of speech is non-existent, it’s startling to observe how Venezuela, where I was happily raised, is fast becoming Cuba’s mirror image: Dismantling of fundamental democratic rights deserved by its people and citizens of the world.

Never look for the story in the ‘lede.’ Reporters are required to put what’s happened up top, but the practiced pundit places a nugget of news, even a startling insight, halfway down the column, directed at the politiscenti. When pressed for time, the savvy reader starts there.

The experience of the human, male or female, cannot be completely defined by one startling, surprising, or gigantic life experience.

Father, we thank you, especially for letting me fly this flight – for the privilege of being able to be in this position, to be in this wondrous place, seeing all these many startling, wonderful things that you have created.

For a startling period of my life, I reported the Troubles in Ireland for the BBC. I lived in Dublin and was called out to all sorts of incidents that, if taken together, add up to a war – bombings, assassinations, riots, shootings, robberies, jailbreaks, kidnappings, and sieges.

When you actually see Barack Obama, it’s startling how slight he is and how young he looks.

Startling as the Gospel of Judas sounds, it amplifies hints we have long read in the Gospels of Mark and John that Jesus knew and even instigated the events of his passion, seeing them as part of a divine plan.

It’s a bit startling to achieve global recognition before the age of 30 on account of your sister, your brother-in-law and your bottom. One day I might be able to make sense of this. In the meantime I think it’s fair to say that it has its upside and its downside.

Art morphs with what’s going on in the world. We say ‘Ferguson’; we don’t say ‘Mike Brown.’ Just like we say ‘Selma,’ not ‘Jimmie Lee Jackson.’ There is something startling about the people in a particular place, a city or a small town, rising up and taking to the streets.

What I really like is an intelligent review. It doesn’t have to be positive. A review that has some kind of insight, and sometimes people say something that’s startling or is so poignant.

Developing compassion for Congress and politicians is a good way to begin practicing the new social activism if you want to make effective changes in the world. Perhaps the most startling new insight of all is that there is no other way to effectively change the world.

As a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, I will be participating in several hearings on the startling revelations contained in the report.

The Rio de Contas, a wide, almost delta-like river, was startling, a sudden big sky and a feeling of openness, and very bright. It was noisy with birds. The rain forest houses most of the earth’s plant and animal population. I hadn’t anticipated it would be so loud.

I was thrust, excitingly, via ‘Elizabeth’ and ‘Shakespeare in Love,’ into a position one can only dream of, but it was startling, too. I was offered a multitude of roles riding horses in flouncy shirts, and I just thought, ‘Hang on, I’ve just done that. What next?’

When I did my research on this topic, I came to the startling conclusion that the Federal Reserve System does not need to be audited – it needs to be abolished.

I remember being shocked when I came out from under the focusing cloth after a minute or two being submerged within that, at the startling green color of those ferns.

Economists often like startling theorems, results which seem to run counter to conventional wisdom.

The physical voice we use in prayer need not be great nor startling; even should we not lift up any great cry or shout, God will yet hear us.