Surprising Discoveries Quotes

My mother was from West Bromwich; my grandfather was Pakistani. I had an aunt who started trying to trace the family tree and stopped when she saw what turned up.

Bret Hart is my cousin, I'm told. Didn't know that until I was, I don't know, 28, 25.

Reading a Lydia Davis story collection is like reaching into what you think is a bag of potato chips and pulling out something else entirely: a gherkin, a pepper corn, a truffle, a piece of beef jerky.

As a person navigating the waters of public scrutiny, you are often unable to hold on to personal heroes or villains. Inevitably you will meet your hero, and he may turn out to be less than impressive, while your villain turns out to be the coolest cat you've ever met.

Truth makes many appeals, not the least of which is its power to shock.

You meet lots of people in your life, and sometimes you think that people are a certain way, and then they reveal themselves to be a different way.

Watching Rachel Maddow is like going to Target. You went in for milk, but you left with shampoo, candles, and the entire history of the Byzantine Empire. 'I didn't need this.'

I had innumerable analysts who came to me in apology that the world that we were finding was not the world that they had thought existed and that they had estimated. Reality on the ground differed in advance.

To some extent, I'm mildly surprised by every new piece, by the precise path that my interest takes.

You go into the Lions camp with preconceived ideas about players and teams and then find guys are actually very different, and the beauty of the Lions is that all those characters are moulded into it. I find that exciting.

Everybody always asks me what the big surprises were that I discovered about Woody and I never have a good stock answer for that, I never know quite what to tell them other than generally that he's much less neurotic and quirky than I would have expected.

I do not believe they've run out of surprises.

I knew there were all kinds of interesting things going on at Google, but now that I've seen them, my mind has been blown - in a great way. They have all these amazing projects and people that the world doesn't know anything about. I'm like a kid in a candy store - it's an idea factory.

You think you know everything about a person, but the truth often comes as a surprise.

No one predicted Mercury would be a planetary core with the mantle stripped off. No one predicted volcanoes on the Jovian moons, or oceans on the inside of them. I can tell you, for every single planet, huge 'we never guessed that' things.

There is a lot of things out here that sometimes you don't realize because you're inside the circle, but once you're out, there's a lot of things that pop up, and you'd be surprised.

I guess, what I'm saying is that when I've been this surprised by my own characters and world, all bets are off.

And sometimes when we listen, we are led into places we do not expect, into adventures we do not always understand.

I like things that take you by the hand and say, 'You think you know about this - you think you understand it - but there's so much that you don't.'

Science is founded on uncertainty. Each time we learn something new and surprising, the astonishment comes with the realization that we were wrong before.

When we first sent missions to Jupiter, no one expected to find moons that would have active volcanoes. And I could go down a long list of how often I've been surprised by the richness of nature.

There is some reason, obviously, that you are drawn to your material, but the way in which you explore it might come to be quite different from what you would expect.

Til I was 10 years, I didn't know I had only two siblings. I always thought I had 10 and that they were all my family.

I look for those moments that are 'gee whiz' moments. There's some 'gee whiz' stories in our show, and they can't be written like A-1 in the Times. They have to be written more like Page 6 in the Post.

Sometimes you find your heroes in the unlikeliest places.