1.
To my utter astonishment I saw an airship descending over my cow lot. It was occupied by six of the strangest beings I ever saw. They were jabbering together, but we could not understand a word they said.
Alexander Hamilton
2.
I was happy, I knew that. While experiencing happiness, we have difficulty in being conscious of it. Only when the happiness is past and we look back on it do we suddenly realize - sometimes with astonishment - how happy we had been.
Nikos Kazantzakis
3.
There’s nothing better than discovering, to your own astonishment, what you’re meant to do. It’s like falling in love.
Mike Nichols
4.
That which is not slightly distorted lacks sensible appeal; from which it follows that irregularity – that is to say, the unexpected, surprise and astonishment, are a essential part and characteristic of beauty.
Charles Baudelaire
6.
I am interested only in the unknown and I work for my own astonishment.
Roberto Matta
7.
A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, fruitless, unremitting toil.
Terry Eagleton
8.
I don't know what God is, or what God had in mind when the universe was set in motion. In fact, I don't know if God even exists, although I confess that I sometimes find myself praying in times of great fear, or despair, or astonishment at a display of unexpected beauty.
Jon Krakauer
9.
One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.
James A. Baldwin
12.
I don't know about you, but I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves "Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment."
Kurt Vonnegut
13.
The knights of the theater represented to me not only the pinnacle of the profession but the esteem in which the profession was held. To find myself, to my astonishment, in that company is the grandest thing that has professionally happened to me.
Patrick Stewart
14.
The ideas are secondary to the primary premise of people's potential. I'm always in wonder and astonishment.
Jean Houston
16.
Attention, if sudden and close, graduates into surprise; and this into astonishment; and this into stupefied amazement.
Charles Darwin
17.
Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible.
Eugene Ionesco
18.
The politics of surprise leads through the Gates of Astonishment into the Kingdom of Hope.
Max Lerner
19.
To mourn, perhaps, is simply to prolong a posture of astonishment.
Sara Suleri
20.
When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It’s the astonishment of being myself
Jorge Luis Borges
21.
I must be informed, that one of my great duties was, to obey the priests in all things; and this I soon learnt, to my utter astonishment and horror, was to live in the practice of criminal intercourse with them.
Maria Monk
22.
Each individual fact, taken by itself, can indeed arouse our curiosity or our astonishment, or be useful to us in its practical applications.
Hermann von Helmholtz
23.
I find to my mixed astonishment that I do dream, but I didn't know it.
Theodore Sturgeon
24.
HELPED are those who are shown the existence of the Creator's magic in the Universe; they shall experience delight and astonishment without ceasing.
Alice Walker
25.
At first he was very discouraging, to my astonishment then, but now I fancy he did it as a forlorn hope to check me; he said the whole idea was so disgusting that he could not entertain it for a moment.
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson
27.
A lot of what I am looking for is a moment of astonishment, he says. Those moments of pure consciousness when you involuntarily inhale and say 'Wow!'
Joel Meyerowitz
28.
I shall continue to explore-the astonishment of living.
Enid Bagnold
29.
The astonishment of life is the absence of any appearances of reconciliation between the theory and the practice of life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
30.
Much of our understanding of God's action in our lives in achieved in hindsight. When a particular crisis or event in our life has passed we cry out in astonishment like Jacob, 'The Lord is in this place and I never knew it.
Sheila Cassidy
31.
If there be a skeptical star I was born under it. Yet I have lived all my days in complete astonishment.
William Macneile Dixon
32.
I sometimes think that the universe is a machine designed for the perpetual astonishment of astronomers.
Arthur C. Clarke
33.
This is that eloquence the ancients represented as lightning, bearing down every opposer; this the power which has turned whole assemblies into astonishment, admiration and awe- - that is described by the torrent, the flame, and every other instance of irresistible impetuosity.
Oliver Goldsmith
34.
People who relate what they believe to be new and startling information like to have such information received with exclamations of astonishment and admiration.
Barbara Mertz
36.
He produced a handkerchief—crisply folded—and handed it to her. She took it with silent astonishment. She’d never before known anyone who carried a handkerchief.
Cassandra Clare
37.
Someone once wrote that a novel should deliver a series of small astonishments. I get the same thing spending an hour with you.
E. Lockhart
38.
She had imagined Jace leaping from the bed in astonishment and gasping something like "Egad!" This didn't happen-largely, she suspected, because Jace had seen much stranger things in his life, and also because nobody used the word "Egad!" anymore. His eyes widened, though.
Cassandra Clare
40.
A writer lives, at best, in a state of astonishment.
William Sansom
41.
Now and again I feel the astonishment of being alive like this, in this body.
Stephen Dunn
42.
The Astonishment Tapes will now take its place within the growing field of international research about postwar American poetry's important contribution to world literature. Miriam Nichols has once again done exceptional scholarship.
Peter Gizzi
43.
The Emrys! The Emrys is here!' Merlin shook his head in astonishment. 'Has it come to this?' he wondered. 'Even small children know me by sight.
Stephen R. Lawhead
44.
There is that unique moment when one confronts something new and astonishment begins.
Diane Ackerman
45.
The worship of convention has never yet led to astonishment and a joyous leap in human potential.
Tama J. Kieves
46.
Frederick Buechner brings the reader to his knees, sometimes in laughter, sometimes in an astonishment very close to prayer, and at the best of times in a combination of both.
Michael Mewshaw
47.
Gordon Way's astonishment at being suddenly shot dead was nothing compared to his astonishment at what happened next.
Douglas Adams
48.
That`s an astonishment that we`re waiting to find out what the [Donald Trump] policy is, that was the central plank, the central rationale for his candidacy.
Michelle Goldberg
49.
We came to realise - first with astonishment, then bitterness, and finally with indifference - that intellect apparently wasn't the most important thing...not ideas, but the system; not freedom, but drill. We had joined up with enthusiasm and with good will; but they did everything to knock that out of us.
Erich Maria Remarque
50.
Yeah, well, food's one of the five exceptions to Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfigurations," said Ron, to general astonishment.
J. K. Rowling