Leo Rosten Quotes

What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens.

It is an endless procession of surprises. The expected rarely occurs and never in the expected manner.

I hate to keep repeating my mantra, but, boy, there are things happening that we did not expect to happen in any way, shape, manner, or form.

Sometimes there's no warning. Nothing at all.

Things we do not expect, happen more frequently than we wish.

When in the end, the day came on which I was going away, I learned the strange learning that things can happen which we ourselves cannot possibly imagine, either beforehand, or at the time when they are taking place, or afterwards when we look back on them.

While most of the things you've worried about have never happened, it's a different story with the things you haven't worried about. They are the ones that happen.

Most things in life come as a surprise.

It is always the unreadable that occurs.

… experience should teach us that it is always the unexpected that does occur!

Everything works out in weird ways in the NFL.

You just can't get surprised when you get surprised, because weird stuff just comes over the transom all the time, and it's not necessarily anything that you've planned for or anticipated.

The things I thought would happen didn't. Things I never anticipated unfolded.

I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different—unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.

The things that you can't really foresee and that kind of surprise you, and a lot of times they are bad, but other times, they bring something different and new to the table.

If you ask me a question, don't tell me what the question is in advance, 'cause I'd rather not know.

Life doesn't always give us what we are expecting.

The one thing we can all be sure about in politics is you are as well to expect the unexpected.

Life is always surprising to me. When you think it's going to get dull, it never really does.

Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.

No amount of thought can ever reveal what comes unexpectedly.

The future has a way of arriving unannounced.

The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them.

Who likes surprises? Nobody I know likes surprises. But facts change on the ground.

History, as it comes into our daily lives, is charged with surprise and shock.