J. H. Wyman Quotes

Some things don't wind up sounding like you'd expect, which is just as well.

With every project, there are things that surprise you with the meaning they take on as you start to use them.

You never know when something's going to hit you in a particular way and just knock you loose.

I'm particularly interested in black swan events: unprecedented surprises that destroy the conventional wisdom about how the world works.

Unforeseen surprises are the rule in science, not the exception. Remember: Stuff happens.

Generally my typical books have lots of twists and turns a big surprise ending and then usually another surprise at the end and ideally, as in Garden of Beasts, we get to the very end and we find at the last few pages that there's yet another surprise.

History is littered with wars which everybody knew would never happen.

Sometimes you want to run away, sometimes you think you do, but you never had a dream like this before and you don't want to ask for more, sometimes you leave a mark before you know the score.

Some things are so unexpected that no one is prepared for 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.

I'm always surprised by things that happen to my work.

I think there are narratives going on all the time that we think of as tangential - up until they turn out to be deciding factors in our lives.

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

Significant consequences can begin very inconsequentially. That's one thing that fascinates me. The other thing that fascinates me is how accident can undermine something that's unfolding, something that might have played out differently otherwise.

You know, the process of making a documentary is one of discovery, and like writing a story, you follow a lead and that leads you to something else and then by the time you finish, the story is nothing like you expected.

History is totally unpredictable.

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

Having overthrown this one devil, we might be facing seven new devils .

In world history man’s actions result in something quite different from what he purposes or intends.

No man can tell what the future may bring forth

Most of the things that have happened in my life have been pretty arbitrary. I walk into a room, and someone hits me with a two-by-four, and that changes my life. I'm not sure what I've learned from anything.

The older I get, the more I'm surprised with life. Things don't end up the way you think they will.

The big things are the things that you don't expect.

I think, like all big things, you don't know they're going to be a big thing when you start. You just kind of, like, play because it's fun, and it's interesting, and then it turns out to be way more important than you expected.

If I look back, I think most of the things I did - the films, the books, the collaborations with these magazines - were mostly by accident.