Surprise Endings Quotes

You might ask yourself why you want to surprise your readers in the first place. A surprise ending is sort of like a surprise party. Probably some people, somewhere, enjoy having friends and trusted colleagues lunge at them in the sudden blinding light of their own living room, but I don't think most of us do. ~ Jincy Willett

Plot twist: everything goes exactly as planned. ~ Criss Jami

I'm an optimistic believer in good deeds, surprise endings, and the pleasant twists of life. ~ Josh Walker

Sometimes the best answers to prayer are the ones God doesn't answer. ~ Robin Jones Gunn

We all need to have dreams. The question is, does the dream control you or do you control the dream? ~ Robin Jones Gunn

For me, I was able to make that statement of faith early on when my career began, so there weren't really a lot of surprises. People around me knew where my husband Ray and I stood as far as my faith went. ~ Jodi Benson

If you can sustain your interest in what you're doing, you're an extremely fortunate person. What you see very frequently in people's professional lives, and perhaps in their emotional life as well, is that they lose interest in the third act. You sort of get tired, and indifferent, and, sometimes, defensive. And you kind of lose your capacity for astonishment - and that's a great loss, because the world is a very astonishing place.
What I feel fortunate about is that I'm still astonished, that things still amaze me. And I think that that's the great benefit of being in the arts, where the possibility for learning never disappears, where you basically have to admit you never learn it. ~ Milton Glaser

American secretaries of state have typically been more buttoned up than bon vivant, but John Quincy Adams's diplomatic successes - bigger than anything presidential or legislative that he achieved - still surprise a student of his personality. ~ Thomas Mallon

Perhaps that is the real surprise of love; it exists, but one may not attribute causes and effects to it. The existence may appear to be a mere fallacy to the minds of some, and by the time they realise what hit them, they would already be down and dead. ~ Faraaz Kazi

This is what you British do not understand about the French. You think you must work, work, work, work and open on Sundays and make mothers and fathers with families slave in supermarkets at three o'clock in the morning and make people leave their homes and their churches and their children and go shopping on Sundays.'
'Their shops are open on Sundays?' said Benoît in surprise.
'Yes! They make people work on Sundays! And through lunchtimes! But for what? For rubbish from China? For cheap clothes sewed by poor women in Malaysia? For why? So you can go more often to KFC and get full of fried chicken? You would rather have six bars of bad chocolate than one bar of good chocolate. Why? Why are six bad things better than one good thing? I don't understand. ~ Jenny Colgan

The Fates themselves grant us one or two places in our lives where the thread untwists and we can follow either one strand or the other. Better to know when and where those choices will come to us instead of being taken by surprise. "
"Why only one or two?" I asked, thinking of all the moments my life had already accumulated in which I'd chosen to follow a different path than the one most people would expect of me. "Why not say that every day lets me choose my own future?"
The priest chuckled. "What a gift you have for joking, Lady Helen! You know your future. You'll be Sparta's queen, living a life blessed by the gods. Your only surprises will be the name of your husband and whether your babies will be sons or daughters. You don't need to visit the Pythia. But your noble brothers will be heroes, making their own futures; heroes should know what awaits them."
"He's right, Helen," Castor said. "Polydeuces and I should know our fate."
Castor's fate? He didn't need an oracle to discover that; I could tell him exactly what it would be. The young priest's glib words were better than underground fumes for giving me a vision of what lay in store for both of my brothers: They were going to have their ears filled with flattery, then be persuaded to leave a rich gift at Apollo's shrine just to hear some poor girl babble riddles while she choked half to death on smoke. Then they'd made another offering just to have Apollo's priests translate the Pythia's wild words. ~ Esther M. Friesner

The smoke stung at the corners of Uri's eyes as he struggled to open them. He could hear the battle sounds all around him and smell the iron from the blood drenched warfare in the air. Much to his surprise, death had not yet claimed him. He could feel Raimie's body under his own, no warmth came from him, however, and Uri feared the worse. Over his shoulder, he heard a large blast and the earth shook under him.
The trackers had obviously followed someone through. There were hundreds of designated transportation locations as part of the evacuation drill. Absolutely nobody was allowed to transport directly to a primary facility for this exact reason. If a tracker were to follow your transportation signature to the next facility, the Guardians could be nearly wiped out in one night. The secrecy of the facilities and cloaking spells were key in their safety.
Uri knew if he or Raimie had any chance of surviving, he needed to get clear of the fighting and find a healer. Attempting to sit up, he braced his weight on the earth just beside Raimie's head. He quickly reconsidered as the unbearable pain shot through his side. Running his hand down to the source, he could feel the shaft of an arrow jutting out from his side; a warm wetness covered his fingertips.
In the distance, Uri could hear someone crying out in agony, not a voice he recognized, yet the pain in it seemed all too familiar. Another blast rang out from behind him as Uri slumped to the ground, groaning in pa ~ Wendy Owens

But the world is strange and endings are not truly endings no matter how the stars might wish it so. ~ Erin Morgenstern

It came to him then, permeated his disjointed thoughts. Billie was teaching him - him - how to make love. With a jolt of surprise at the crashing irony, Adrian realized he hadn't known how until now. He, the consummate lover, so renown for his sexual skill, so proficient and controlled and practiced, had only played at making love, where Billie ... God. Clearly, it was all she knew. Pretense just wasn't in her spectrum of capabilities. ~ Shelby Reed

Girls and women, in their new, particular unfolding, will only in passing imitate men's behavior and misbehavior and follow in male professions. Once the uncertainty of such transitions is over it will emerge that women have only passed through the spectrum and the variety of those (often laughable) disguises in order to purify their truest natures from the distorting influences of the other sex. Women, in whom life abides and dwells more immediately, more fruitfully and more trustingly, are bound to have ripened more thoroughly, become more human human beings, than a man, who is all too light and has not been pulled down beneath the surface of life by the weight of a bodily fruit and who, in his arrogance and impatience, undervalues what he thinks he loves. This humanity which inhabits woman, brought to term in pain and humiliation, will, once she has shrugged off the conventions of mere femininity through the transformations of her outward status, come clearly to light, and men, who today do not yet feel it approaching, will be taken by surprise and struck down by it. One day (there are already reliable signs which speak for it and which begin to spread their light, especially in the northern countries), one day there will be girls and women whose name will no longer just signify the opposite of the male but something in their own right, something which does not make one think of any supplement or limit but only of life and existence: the female human being.

This ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

The beauty of life isn't the perfectioned moments or storybook endings; the beauty of life is when you fall flat on your face, the Lord picks you up, then you look around and cheer, after all, a merry heart is the medicine! ~ Mary Kate

Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things - naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror - are too terrible to really grasp ever at all.It is only later, in solitude, in memory that the realization dawns: when the ashes are cold; when the mourners have departed; when one looks around and finds oneself - quite to one's surprise - in an entirely different world. ~ Donna Tartt

When I lie waking all alone,
Recounting what I have ill done,
My thoughts on me then tyrannize,
Fear and sorrow me surprise,
Whether I tarry still or go,
Methinks the time moves very slow,
All my griefs to this are jolly,
Naught so sad as melancholy.
'Tis my sole plague to be alone,
I am a beast, a monster grown,
I will no light nor company,
I find it now my misery.
The scene is turn'd, my joys are gone,
Fear, discontent, and sorrows come.
All my griefs to this are folly,
Naught so fierce as melancholy. ~ Robert Burton

When you come to a point where nothing looks surprising to you, you can then analyse the matters calmly and with much better precision! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Deep down behind those hostile eyes was a very little girl who had already learned that life really isn't much fun for anybody; and the best way to avoid further rejection was to made herself as objectionable as possible. Then it would never come as a surprise to find herself unloved. Only a simple fact. ~ Torey L. Hayden

You probably have a client list a mile long. I shouldn't expect royal treatment." His mouth twitched. "Although I guess I do anyway." Cinder's heart tripped as his grin caught her by surprise, every bit as charming and unexpected as it had been at the market. ~ Marissa Meyer

Kristin comes down the stairs, and the pressure on my chest snaps. I take a moment to turn away, inhaling deeply, blinking away tears. She sets the plate on a table behind the couch, and half tiptoes back up the stairs.

Thank god. I don't think I could have handled maternal attention right this second. My body feels like it's on a hair trigger.

I need to get it together. This is why people avoid me. Someone asks if I want a drink and I have a panic attack.

"You're okay." Declan is beside me, and his voice is low and soft, the way it was in the foyer. He's so hard all the time, and that softness takes me by surprise. I blink up at him.

"You're okay," he says again.

I like that, how he's so sure. Not Are you okay? No question about it.

You're okay.

He lifts one shoulder in a half shrug. "But if you're going to lose it, this is a pretty safe place to fall apart." He takes two cookies from the plate, then holds one out to me. "Here. Eat your feelings."

I'm about to turn him down, but then I look at the cookie. I was expecting something basic, like sugar or chocolate chip. This looks like a miniature pie, and sugar glistens across the top. "What . . . is that?"

"Pecan pie cookies," says Rev. He's taken about five of them, and I think he might have shoved two in his mouth at once. "I could live on them for days."

I take the one Declan offered and nibble a bit from the side. ~ Brigid Kemmerer

All the overpowering blinding, bewildering, first effects of strong surprise were over with her. Still, however, she had enough to feel! It was agitation, pain, pleasure, a something between delight and misery. ~ Jane Austen

Don't let your imagination take you by surprise. ~ Jimi Hendrix

Roadblock #5: It's Unpredictable
By and large, human beings don't like surprises. I know that I don't. Okay, maybe I like that rare piece of unexpected good news or a letter from a friend or a thoughtful thank-you. But I'm willing to bet that people in funny hats jumping out of dark closets are responsible for more heart attacks than expressions of unbridled delight. When the doorbell rings late at night, I'm under no illusion that it's the Publisher's Clearing House Prize Patrol!
This, most likely, goes back to our caveman past when a big, exciting surprise was apt to be something like an 800-pound,snarling, saber-toothed tiger about to rip the head from our shoulders. Surprises were usually bad news. (Think about this the next time you're crouching in the dark in somebody's front hall closet with their raincoats and umbrellas.) ~ Paul Powers

Think to yourself that every day is your last; the hour to which you do not look forward will come as a welcome surprise. ~ Horace

It should not be a surprise to find that s/m fantasy is significant in women's sex lives. Women may be born free but they are born into a system of subordination. We are not born into equality and do not have equality to eroticise. We are not born into power and do not have power to eroticise. We are born into subordination and it is in subordination that we learn our sexual and emotional responses. It would be surprising indeed if any woman reared under male supremacy was able to escape the forces constructing her into a member of an inferior slave class. ~ Sheila Jeffreys

Behind Alystra was the known world, full of wonder yet empty of surprise, drifting like a brilliant but tightly closed bubble down the river of time. Ahead, separated from her by no more than the span of a few footsteps, was the empty wilderness - the world of the desert - the world of the Invaders. Alvin ~ Arthur C. Clarke

It may come as a surprise to some academics, but there is a marked relationship between economic power and political power. ~ Michael Pare

Lies. All lies. Bree was shaking so hard she bit her tongue, but she didn't even feel the blood in her mouth.
Kill her husband and seduce the widow. She thought she'd never felt as angry as when Michael died, but this, oh God, her entire body was a live wire of rage. She was so
furious, she was almost numb. So numb that she didn't even feel herself reaching for the gun she had pulled out of the glove compartment and pocketed.
So numb that she didn't feel herself lift the gun and aim.
So numb that she saw nothing, but his eyes, staring back at her in wide eyed surprise and confusion.
She felt so numb she didn't even feel herself pull the trigger. ~ E. Jamie

Every now and then, a presidential candidate surprises us with a truly human and honest moment. ~ Ron Fournier

As the sky behind the Eddy Match Factory across the river filled with light, the steady timbre of the water and rapids became sentences spoken in a soft female voice and Eileen accepted, without surprise, the presence of her mother's lost words. So this is what it is to be away, her mother's voice told her. You are never present where you stand. You see the polished dishes in your kitchen cupboard throwing back the hearth light, but they know neither you nor the meals you have taken from their surfaces. Your flagstones are a series of dark lakes that you scour, and the light that touches and alters them sends you unspeakable messages. Waves arch like mantles over everything that burns. Each corner is a secret and your history is a lie. ~ Jane Urquhart

When I caught up to him again, my fingers closed around the soft, loose leather of his jacket's sleeve. At the
slightest tug, Liam turned, his blue eyes lit up in surprise. I took a step back and pulled my hand back to my side,
shocked at myself. It had felt natural to do it - I hadn't been thinking at all, only feeling a very sharp, real need
to be close to him. ~ Alexandra Bracken

There are no endings. ~ Kevin Brooks

It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alteration between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Do you know why I love mathematics?"
"Because it blew your mind for free when you couldn't get drugs?"
Eccles snorted in surprise. "Well, yes, but there's another reason. ~ Brendan Halpin

A 2016 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America suggested that health care providers may underestimate black patients' pain in part due to a belief that they simply don't actually feel as much pain - a myth that dates all the way back to the days of slavery. For centuries, the claim that black people were biologically different from whites was 'championed by scientists, physicians, and slave owners alike to justify slavery and the inhumane treatment of black men and women in medical research,' the authors wrote. Black people were thought to have 'thicker skulls, less sensitive nervous systems,' and a super-human ability to 'tolerate surgical operations with little, if any, pain at all.'

In the first phase of the study, over two hundred white medical students and residents were asked whether a series of statements about differences between black and white patients were true or false. Some of the statements were true, while others - for example, 'blacks' skin is thicker than whites' and 'blacks' nerve endings are less sensitive than whites' - were false. They found that a full half of the respondents thought that one or more the false statements - many of which were 'fantastical in nature' - were possibly, probably, or definitely true. Also, notably, many of them didn't agree with the statements that were actually true; only half of the residents knew that white patients are less likely to have heart disease t ~ Maya Dusenbery

He shrugged, a boyish mischief lighting his eyes. "I wanted to surprise you. I will admit that I knew you were a member. I also know you don't have a Dom. I guess I was hoping you would show me around." Sarah leaned over, whispering in her ear. "I am fairly certain my ovaries just spit out an egg. ~ Lexi Blake

We have to find a way to push them together," Minerva said. "You know perfectly well that if Oliver marries, Gran will forget this ridiculous idea of hers about the rest of us marrying. She just wants him to produce an heir"
Hetty's eyebrows shot high. Her granddaughter had a big surprise coming down the road.
"And you're willing to throw him under the wheels of the coach to save yourself, is that it?" Jarret quipped.
"No!" Her voice softened. "You and I both know he needs someone to drag him out of himself. Or he's just going to get scarier as he gets older." She paused. "Did you tell him about Miss Butterfield's being an heiress?"
That certainly arrested Hetty's attention. She hadn't dreamed that the girl had money.
"Yes, but I fear that might have been a mistake-when I suggested that he marry her for her fortune, he got angry."
Of course he got angry, you fool, Hetty thought with a roll of her eyes. Honestly, did her grandson know nothing about his brother?
"For goodness sake, Jarret, you weren't supposed to suggest that. You were supposed to get him concerned that she might fall prey to fortune hunters."
At least Minerva had a brain.
"Damn," Jarret said. "Then I probably shouldn't have exaggerated the amount."
"Oh, Lord." Minerva sighed. "By how much?"
"I kind of…tripled it."
Minerva released an unladylike oath. "Why did you do that? Now he won't go near her. Haven't you noticed how much he hates talk of marrying ~ Sabrina Jeffries

When you talk about avant-garde cuisine, the surprise factor is really important. For example, I love looking at blogs and the photos, but I'm not that keen on other people taking photos of my dishes. ~ Ferran Adria

When you are in love, you always want to be with your lover. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

To her surprise, Lucky tilted his head and looked her in the eye, appearing oddly ... crestfallen, she thought. "Don't be nervous," he said. "I hate making you nervous. ~ Toni Blake

Just in my experience, all people do is take. None of them give a damn about helping someone else. (Aiden)
And sometimes people can surprise you. (Leta)
Yeah. You're right. I'm constantly amazed by the unprovoked treachery they're capable of. (Aiden) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

I guess I didn't have a lot of friends, so that's what made videogames so important. They played back. I could do them myself. Solitaire can't surprise you; there's no AI. But videogames play back with you. ~ Tim Schafer

Well, everything comes to an end, sooner or later," she said. "Everything begins and ends. Everything changes. ~ Peter Boody

The world wasn't split into unhappy endings and happily ever afters. There were blessings everywhere and a thousand shades of joy all around him. ~ Talia Hibbert

I thought of happy endings, how novelists usually flinched. To admit your characters are doomed means you are too. ~ Darcey Steinke

Life was mostly made up of things you couldn't control, full of surprises, and they weren't always good. Life wasn't what you made it. You were what life made you. ~ Sara Zarr

Life can surprise you. You want something with every ounce of blood that flows in your veins, and then one day it's yours. Right there before you. Everything. You break out in a cold sweat with the undeniable realization that what you really want is home. Sometimes finding home is a long time coming. A long journey. ~ Brenda Sutton Rose