Unexpected Finds Quotes

Amazon.com isn't the same as going down an aisle. The same as record stores. You'll go for Billie Holiday, and you buy Gustav Mahler as you're going out the door.

To my mind there is nothing so beautiful or so provocative as a secondhand book store...To me it is astonishing and miraculous to think that any one of us can poke among the stalls for something to read overnight--and that this something may be the sum of a lifetime of sweat, tears, and genius that some poor, struggling, blessed fellow expended trying to teach us the truth.

Wherever we go in the mountains, we find more than we seek.

...what will we someday do, I always wonder, without the pleasures of turning through books and stumbling on things we never meant to find?

In London, I discovered a peculiar building by Holland Park where the globe was shrunk to fit a British perspective, but which had a library with Sri Lankan books I had never seen before.

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.'

If you know what you want, you use Google. But if you don't know what you want, and you want to be surprised and find something you didn't expect, we want you come to StumbleUpon. Really, that idea of being a discovery engine versus a search engine.

The terrible thing about the Internet and Amazon is that they take the magic and happy chaos out of book shopping. The Internet might give you what you want, but it won't give you what you need.

With all of their benefits, and there are many, one of the things I regret about e-books is that they have taken away the necessity of trawling foreign bookshops or the shelves of holiday houses to find something to read. I've come across gems and stinkers that way, and both can be fun.

Thrift shopping is all about going into the thrift shop and having no expectation of what you might find.

I miss the experience of walking into a record store and find old stuff without expecting to.

In the fast-changing, information-filled world of the Internet, you never know what you might find. Maybe you'll discover a great price on an airline ticket, or maybe you'll come across that quote you've been racking your brain for.

Every day, somebody has a song they want you to hear, and you're stupid if you don't listen to it because you never know what you may find.

Every week, I heave open a supermarket skip and find therein a more exotic shopping list of items than I could possibly have invented - Belgian chocolates, ripe bananas, almond croissants, stone-ground raisin bread - often so much it would have fed a hundred people.

I ransack public libraries & find them full of sunk treasure.

The woman just ahead of you at the supermarket checkout has all the delectable groceries you didn't even know they carried.

You can find a diamond in the rough a lot of times.

I quite like the element of charity shops not being sorted out.