22 of the best book quotes about unexpected events
01
“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.”
“I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.”
″ A competent general always draws up his battle plan before engaging the enemy; he doesn’t postpone basic decisions until the firing starts. But he is also prepared to change his plans if necessary to cope with an unexpected turn of events. So be ready to implement your plans as the day’s battle against the clock begins.”
“It was the kind of thing that showed you that a little guy could still make all the difference, and it reminded you how suddenly events could turn around in this world, for better or for worse.”
“And perhaps that was the worst of it. Whether you were a banker or a baker, a homemaker or homeless, it was with you night and day - a terrible, unrelenting uncertainty about the future, a feeling that the ground could drop out from under you for good at any moment.”
“After the accident Ove bought a Saab 95 so he’d have space for Sonja’s wheelchair. That same year Rune bought a Volvo 245 to have space for a stroller. Three years later Sonja got a more modern wheelchair and Ove bought a hatchback, a Saab 900. Rune bought a Volvo 265 because Anita had started talking about having another child.”
“But from the first months of his wife’s pregnancy, something new, unpleasant, depressing, and unseemly, and from which there was no way of escape, unexpectedly showed itself.”
“Louis Creed, who had lost his father at three and who had never known a grandfather, never expected to find a father as he entered his middle age, but that was exactly what happened.”
“When your day is a museum of disappointments, hanging from events that were outside of your control, when you feel like your guardian angel put in his two weeks notice two months ago and just decided not to tell you..”
“Sometimes an unexpected wave comes along, sucks you up and refuses to spit you back out. Ryle is my unexpected tidal wave, and right now I’m skimming the beautiful surface.”
“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.”
“Before Heart’s Delight, I was a boy, he thinks.
Before Heart’s Delight, I was a child
When he first saw Ann-Katrin on the bus, he was mesmerized, captivated, consumed.
But that was before.”
“It’s a little story of a family that is set around the turn of the century. The father has to leave his job abruptly and decides to pursue a new career in America. The mother and four children are left in England, staying with two elderly aunts, while the father gets settled.”
The next moment the day became very bothering indeed, because Pooh was so busy not looking where he was going that he stepped on a piece of the Forest which had been left out by mistake; and he only just had time to think to himself: “I’m flying. What Owl does. I wonder how you stop——” when he stopped.
“My dear, it never rains but it pours. How true the old proverbs are. Here am I, who shall be twenty in September, and yet I never had a proposal till to-day, not a real proposal, and to-day I have had three.”
Marilla came briskly forward as Matthew opened the door. But when her eyes fell on the odd little figure in the stiff, ugly dress, with the long braids of red hair and the eager, luminous eyes, she stopped short in amazement.
“Matthew Cuthbert, who’s that?” she ejaculated. “Where is the boy?”
“There wasn’t any boy,” said Matthew wretchedly. “There was only her.”
“The children have not been home for three days, the weather has been so bad. They could not know what is happening—it came suddenly, two months before we expected it.”
“This is strange,” returned Monte Cristo, seeming to yield to his reflections, “that you should find yourself without any preparation in a house where the event happened that causes you so much remorse.”