Tomorrow would be Christmas Day, and she had only $1.87 with which to buy Jim a present. She had been saving every penny she could for months, with this result. Twenty dollars a week doesn’t go far. Expenses had been greater than she had calculated. They always are. Only $1.87 to buy a present for Jim. Her Jim. Many a happy hour she had spent planning for something nice for him. Something fine and rare and sterling—something just a little bit near to being worthy of the honor of being owned by Jim.
Jim stopped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at the scent of quail. His eyes were fixed upon Della, and there was an expression in them that she could not read, and it terrified her. It was not anger, nor surprise, nor disapproval, nor horror, nor any of the sentiments that she had been prepared for. He simply stared at her fixedly with that peculiar expression on his face.
I couldn’t believe it. Among other things, the Herdmans were famous for never sitting still and never paying attention to anyone—teachers, parents (their own or anybody else’s), the truant officer, the police—yet here they were, eyes glued on my mother and taking in every word. ‘What’s that?’ they would yell whenever they didn’t understand the language, and when Mother read about there being no room at the inn, Imogene’s jaw dropped and she sat up in her seat. ‘My God!’ she said. ‘Not even for Jesus?’”
“When seasoned by the subtleties of accident, harmony, favor, wisdom, and inevitability, luck takes on the cast of serendipity. Serendipity happens when a well-trained mind looking for one things encounters something else: the unexpected.”
“Really, though, what do I know about what another person is capable of? I still don’t have a clue what I’m capable of. I keep surprising even myself.”
“My breathing suddenly went still. I looked at Jamie, then up to the ceiling and around the room, doing my best to keep my composure, then back to Jamie again. She smiled at me and I smiled at her and all I could do was wonder how I’d ever fallen in love with a girl like Jamie Sullivan.”
″‘This must be a simply enormous wardrobe!’ thought Lucy, going still further in and pushing the soft folds of the coats aside to make room for her. Then she noticed that there was something crunching under her feet. ‘I wonder is that more moth balls?’ she thought, stooping down to feel it with her hands. But instead of feeling the hard, smooth wood of the floor of the wardrobe, she felt something soft and powdery and extremely cold. ‘This is very queer,’ she said, and went on a step or two further.”
“Without warning, the statue squirmed and bit the side of his thumb. Yelling in surprise, Seth dropped the figurine and the flashlight onto the carpeted floor.”
“It took me by surprise how much I wanted to be kissed by him, to realize that I’d thought about it so often that I’d memorized the exact shape of his lips, that I’d imagined running my finger down the cleft of his chin.”
″‘If you were coming along here when it was half dark, you could easily think those piles of rock were giants. Look at that one, now! You could almost imagine that the lump on top was a head […] And the things sticking out on each side are quite like ears. They’d be horribly big, but then I daresay giants would have big ears, like elephants. And—o-o-o-h!‘”
“It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay. ”
“You’d be surprised how many people violate this simple principle every day of their lives and try to fit square pegs into round holes, ignoring the clear reality that Things Are As They Are.”
“O, welcome, father.
Father, I charge thee, by thy reverence
Here to unfold (though lately we intended
To keep in darkness what occasion now
Reveals before ‘tis ripe) what thou dost know
Hath newly passed between this youth and me.”
″ ‘Well, what would you have me do instead, Gabriel? The more I give in to him, the more I want him.’ My confession appeared to surprise him, but not as much as it surprised me.”
″‘Doon!’ cried Lina. ‘More lights!’ She pointed at the sky. He looked up and saw them—hundreds and hundreds of tiny flecks of light, strewn like spilled salt across the blackness. ‘Oh!’ he whispered. There was nothing else to say. The beauty of these lights made his breath stop in his throat.”
″[Ammu] was surprised at the extent of her daughter’s physical ease with him. Surprised that her child seemed to have a sub-world that excluded her entirely.”
“Walsh hugs me, taking me by surprise. ‘I don’t know how,’ she mutters, ‘but I hope you become queen one day. Imagine what you could do then? The Red queen.‘”
“But the wonderfullest trick of all was the coffin trick. We nailed him into a coffin and he got out of the coffin without removing one nail. . . . There is a trick that would come in handy for me—get me out of this two-by-four situation! . . . You know it don’t take much intelligence to get yourself into a nailed-up coffin, Laura. But who in hell ever got himself out of one without removing one nail?”
“As she reached for it she realized for the first time, and with a small shock, that she had learned enough from her father over the years to become a doctor herself.”
“God is preparing you for greater things. He’s going to take you further than you thought possible, so don’t e surprised when He asks you to think better of yourself and act accordingly.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Little often discussed Stuart quietly between themselves when he wasn’t around, for they had never quite recovered from the shock and surprise of having a mouse in the family. He was so very tiny and presented so many problems to his parents.”
“For the first time since the crash he was not thinking of himself, or his own life. Brian was wondering if the bear was as surprised as he to find another being in the berries.”
“Such a grand house. These must be rich folks. But I must get to work. Here I stand just looking. And me with a whole list of things to do. I think I’ll make a surprise for them. I’ll make lemon-meringue pie. I do make good pies.”
“Who will take care of us out there?” Klaus said, looking out on the flat horizon.
“Nobody,” Violet said. “We’ll have to take care of ourselves. We’ll have to be self-sustaining.”
“Like the hot air mobile home,” Klaus said, “that could travel and survive all by itself.”
“Like me,” Sunny said, and abruptly stood up. Violet and Klaus gasped in surprise as their baby sister took her first wobbly steps, and then walked closely beside her, ready to catch her if she fell.
But she didn’t fall. Sunny took a few more self-sustaining steps, and then the three Baudelaires stood together, casting long shadows across the horizon in the dying light of the sunset.”
″‘Hello, Mr. Popper, up there in Stillwater. Thanks for your nice letter about the pictures of our last expedition. Watch for an answer. But not by letter, Mr. Popper. Watch for a surprise.‘”
″‘Thank you for the surprise, Grandfather,’ said Violet. ‘We’ll never go away from you again.’
‘I hope not, my dear,’ said Mr. Alden. ‘We’ll all live happily ever after.’
And so they did.”
“Afterward, there was that long, crowded pause in which everyone decides that although they are very shaken, and possibly upside down, they are, to their surprise, still alive.”
“Once more on his bicycle The Postman rode To a beautiful palace, so we’ve been told, Where nightingales sang And a sign said ‘SOLD’, With a letter for...Cinderella. (There’s a surprise!)”
“Suddenly, Percy hears a knock at the door. “Who can be at this time of night?”. Percy goes to the door and looks out. It’s a squirrel. “it’s too cold outside, may I come in?. Percy replies: “Never mind, my bed is big” and the squirrel goes into Percy’s bed. It’s warm now.”
“It pleased Ethan to have surprised a pair of lovers on the spot where he and Mattie had stood with such a thirst for each other in their hearts; but he felt a pang at the thought that these two need not hide their happiness.”
“She meowed her biggest meow, very sudden and very, very loud. The man was surprised He dropped his bag. It made a big noise and everyone in the house woke up.”
″‘Chrestomanci!’ she exclaimed. And, as soon as she said it, she clapped on hand over her mouth and mumbled behind it. Her face was red. Cat could see she was surprised, frightened, and greedy, all at the same time.”
“Anastasia went home. She wanted to tell her parents about her decision to become a Catholic, but she knew that she had to tell them at the right moment, in the right way, because if would be something of a surprise. They might even be a little upset, she suspected, that she was changing her name.”
“Sid Parker crouched on the floor, in front of a cage in which two mouse-like creatures had frozen into stillness on the instant. One had been working a little treadmill fastened to the inside of a cage wall. The other had been gnawing at one of the bars of the cage.”
“It’s a noise that Burglar Bill has heard before; the noise of someone opening a window and climbing carefully in.
‘Blow me down,’ says Burglar Bill. ‘I’m being burgled!‘”
“Hari went to her and said, “Let me get the medicine for you. Let me hold the baby.” She looked at him in surprise, then shook her head, saying, “No, no—I can do that,” and he turned away, knowing he could not help her.”
“Erica stayed at the window and wondered about the surprise. It was only half a surprise now, because she knew it was coming, but she was glad in a way of the warning.”
“There was a Young Lady whose eyes
Were unique as to color and size;
When she opened them wide, people all turned aside,
And started away in surprise.”
“But- ‘I started to say, looking from one to the other of these strangers. Who were they? What was going on? There was another man in the living room, half of head shorter than the first, with a bushy moustache that spread across his cheeks.”
“The horsemen swept across the corn-yellow grasses of the hinterland screaming and shouting to arouse fear. The clans people dispersed like scuttling roaches to be run down and either killed or captured.”
“One day the Little House was surprised to see a horseless carriage coming down the winding country road...Pretty soon there were more of them on the road and fewer carriages pulled by horses.”
“This is the way I used to feel in Barbados, Kit thought with surprise. Light as air somehow. Here I’ve been working like a slave, much harder than I’ve ever worked in the onion fields, but I feel as though nothing mattered except just to be alive right at this moment.”
″‘Fancy that!’ said Teddy Robinson to himself, and he felt half surprised and half cross to think he wasn’t quite the dearest person in the whole world.”
“The sky grew darker and darker blue, and soon the stars came out. Teddy Robinson lay and stared at them without blinking, and they twinkled and shone and winked at him as if they were surprised to see a teddy bear lying in the garden.”
“Several walnuts grew in the park, though none were very close. She went to look at the shell- but looked with great astonishment. There was a baby in it.”
“If the elephant had been able to get out, Father and Mother would certainly have been surprised at finding him wandering round the house, because there was no such animal in the village.”
“And the five little Stigginses sat up in bed with their eyes nearly starting out of their heads, and Mrs. Stiggins sat bump upon a chair, because she said it gave her quite a turn, when Ameliar-anne took the cover off the basket.”
“This little baby was the funniest wee creature. He was only about an inch long and covered with soft baby fur, had two big ears, compared to the size of the rest of him, a tiny black nose, and two beady eyes. His mother and father always had a surprised look on their faces, but they looked more surprised than ever now as they gazed at their baby.”
“Blinky Bill had water from the stream sprinkled on his head, much to his surprise, and the ceremony ended without any more interruptions. He was carried home again on his mother’s back, feeling very important after all the fuss and petting.”
“Mr. Jeremy shoved the boat out again a little way, and dropped the bait. There was a bite almost directly; the float gave a tremendous bobbit!
‘A minnow! a minnow! I have him by the nose!’ cried Mr. Jeremy Fisher, jerking up his rod.
But what a horrible surprise! Instead of a smooth fat minnow, Mr. Jeremy landed little Jack Sharp the stickleback, covered with spines!”
“Some have quirkier quirks and deeper secrets than others, but all of them, including one’s own parents, have two or three private habits hidden up their sleeves that would probably make you gasp if you knew about them.”
Mrs. Rachel felt that she had received a severe mental jolt. She thought in exclamation points. A boy! Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert of all people adopting a boy! From an orphan asylum! Well, the world was certainly turning upside down! She would be surprised at nothing after this! Nothing!
“I positively opened my eyes at this new development. Here was my own pet lunatic—the most pronounced of his type that I had ever met with—talking elemental philosophy, and with the manner of a polished gentleman.
“This is a bank-note,” said I, “for five hundred pounds.”
“That is a bank-note,” repeated Mr. Jaggers, “for five hundred pounds. And a very handsome sum of money too, I think. You consider it so?”
“How could I do otherwise!”
“Ah! But answer the question,” said Mr. Jaggers.
“Undoubtedly.”
“You consider it, undoubtedly, a handsome sum of money. Now, that handsome sum of money, Pip, is your own. It is a present to you on this day, in earnest of your expectations. ”
“But, Ellen,” cried she, staring fixed in astonishment, “how dare he speak so to me? Mustn’t he be made to do as I ask him? You wicked creature, I shall tell papa what you said.—Now, then!”
She did not see him straight away, but when she did notice him under the couch—he had to be somewhere, for God’s sake, he couldn’t have flown away—she was so shocked that she lost control of herself and slammed the door shut again from outside. But she seemed to regret her behaviour, as she opened the door again straight away and came in on tip-toe as if entering the room of someone seriously ill or even of a stranger.
“You can talk to me of other women being charming, and of Patti singing divinely, before the girl you loved has even the quiet of a grave to sleep in?”