In the only sense that matters the surprise works as well the twentieth time as the first. It is the quality of unexpectedness, not the fact that delights us. It is even better the second time. Knowing that the 'surprise' is coming we can now fully relish the fact that this path through the shrubbery doesn't look as if it were suddenly going to bring us out on the edge of the cliff. So in literature. We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we are leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness. The children understand this well when they ask for the same story over and over again, and in the same words. They want to have again the 'surprise' of discovering that what seemed Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother is really the wolf. It is better when you know it is coming: free from the shock of actual surprise you can attend better to the intrinsic surprisingness of the peripeteia.

Stop comparing yourself with others. If they are good at something, you too are good at something else. Self-confidence is not measured by your own capabilities versus that of others, but by your own needs.

Stephen Richards

Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.

Thomas Hardy

Sides are being divided now. It's very obvious. So if you're on the other side of the fence, you're suddenly anti-American. It's breeding fear of being on the wrong side.

Sam Shepard

Tim and Fritz Lang I loved working with. Not Hitchcock so much. There was no communication.

Sylvia Sidney

It's afterwards you realize that the feeling of happiness you had with a man didn't necessarily prove that you loved him.

Marguerite Duras

I have always loved truth so passionately that I have often resorted to lying as a way of introducing it into the minds which were ignorant of its charms.

Giacomo Casanova

The very existence of government at all, infers inequality. The citizen who is preferred to office becomes the superior to those who are not, so long as he is the repository of power, and the child inherits the wealth of the parent as a controlling law of society.

James Fenimore Cooper

There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.

Paulo Coelho

So one reason the science educators panic at the first sign of public rebellion is that they fear exposure of the implicit religious content in what they are teaching.

Phillip E. Johnson

Monsters were wild. Monsters were strong. Monsters were fierce and free.If I was monstrous...perhaps it wasn't such a bad thing.

Sarah Diemer

As I define it, rock and roll is dead. The attitude isn't dead, but the music is no longer vital. It doesn't have the same meaning. The attitude, though, is still very much alive -- and it still informs other kinds of music.

David Byrne

Everything is created twice, first in the mind and then in reality.

Robin S. Sharma