Quotes & Sayings About Astonishing

Do you often make meals for outlanders, Miss Click?" There was teasing in his tone and in his astonishing eyes. Scarlet, she looked down at her apron, now soiled by three spots of coffee, a bit lost in the richness of his speech. "You've yet tae call me Doctor, which I dinna mind in the least. But it tells me you are questioning my credentials. And those eyes of yours demand I must somehow prove myself, pass a test. Like your faither did when he ran the Shawnee gauntlet." "You read that in the papers, I reckon." "Aye. Is it true?" She nodded. "He carried the scars to his grave." "So he passed the test. Will I? — Laura Frantz

His wounds, incidentally, must have healed up by now, he felt no handicap anymore, which was astonishing; for, as recalled, after he had nicked his finger with a knife over a month ago, the injury had still been hurting the day before yesterday. "Am I less sensitive now?" he wondered, greedily sucking at the cheese, which had promptly exerted a more emphatic attraction on him than any of the other food. His eyes watered with contentment as he gulped down the cheese, the vegetables, and the sauce in rapid succession. By contrast, he did not relish the fresh foods, he could not even stand their smells, and he actually dragged the things he wanted to eat a short distance away. — Franz Kafka

For a slave to be taught that he should no longer lie and cheat with revolutionary; more astonishing still was the slave's discovery that he did not want to lie or cheat and that he now loved the owner whom he had once resented and feared. — John Charles Pollock

[Ritual] dwells in an invisible reality and gives this reality a vocabulary, props, costume, gesture, scenery. Ritual makes things separate, sets them apart from ordinary affairs and thoughts. Rituals need not be solemn, but they are formalized, stylized, extraordinary, and artificial. In the name of ritual, we can do anything. We can do astonishing acts. In the end, ritual gives us assurance about the unification of things. — Barbara Myerhoff

I'm frequently asked, "Do you believe there's extraterrestrial intelligence?" I give the standard arguments- there are a lot of places out there, the molecules of life are everywhere, I use the word billions, and so on. Then I say it would be astonishing to me if there weren't extraterrestrial intelligence, but of course there is as yet no compelling evidence for it.
Often, I'm asked next, "What do you really think?"
I say, "I just told you what I really think."
"Yes, but what's your gut feeling?"
But I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble. Really, it's okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in. — Carl Sagan

Enchanting is not the word that would immediately spring to mind when describing a play that deals with fractal geometry, iterated algorithms, chaos theory and the second law of thermodynamics, but it is a perfect fit for Tom Stoppard's astonishing 1993 play, which is as beautiful as it is brilliant. This is one Stoppard drama that you don't have to be Einstein to understand
you can feel it as well as think it. ( ... ) Breathtaking, exhilarating and deeply satisfying. — Lyn Gardner

I'd seen my father. He was a poor man, and I watched him do astonishing things. — Sidney Poitier

In Tunisia the Americans had to pay a stiff price for their experience, but it brought rich dividends. Even at that time, the American generals showed themselves to be very advanced in the tactical handling of their forces, although we had to wait until the Patton Army in France to see the most astonishing achievements in mobile warfare. — Erwin Rommel

Like most little girls, I found the lure of grown-up accessories astonishing - lipstick, perfume, hats and gloves. When I write female characters in my historical novels, getting these details right is vital. — Sara Sheridan

Night, the astonishing, the stranger to all that is human, over the mountain-tops mournful and gleaming draws on. It was as though I stood at the topmost point of the earth, where the glittering winter sky is forever unchanging; as though the heath were rigid with frost, and adders, vipers and lizards of transparent ice lay slumbering in their hollows in the — W.G. Sebald

Of course I didn't think I'd heard him correctly. Why would he have told me something so important now, so casually, in the middle of a street fair?
Before I could stop myself, I blurted out the first thing I thought.
"Just one?"
The look he gave me was shattering.
Given everything I knew about him, though, I'd expected him to have killed a man.
It was the fact that his having taken a single life had resulted in his banishment to the Underworld for all eternity that I found so astonishing.
"I had no idea," he said, with a dry smile, "that you were so bloodthirsty, Pierce. Should we try to find you one of those pirate costumes? — Meg Cabot

It's an astonishing skill that people can read, and read well. Very few people can read well. For instance, I have to be very careful with irony, saying something while meaning the exact opposite. — Kurt Vonnegut

It was astonishing to think that life had once been the sum of her current love-affairs. It was now the sum of her current problems. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I find Suez astonishing for the first hour. It is a ditch in a desert, but a stunning one. The sensation of being hemmed in by huge ships, moving at a stately pace through a man-made waterway, is extraordinary. — Rose George

Regular readers will know I'm a fan of (Cristiano) Ronaldo, and an even bigger fan of the man who's assumed his mantle with quite astonishing success, Wayne Rooney. But Messi is on a higher plain than even that pair. — Andy Cole

I think the novel is a wonder....it has vitality to an extraordinary degree, and glamour, and a great deal of underlying thought of unusual quality....And as for the sheer writing, it's astonishing. [About The Great Gatsby] — Maxwell Perkins

The dead can be even more frustrating to deal with than are many of the living, which is astonishing when you consider it's the living who run the Department of Motor Vehicles. — Dean Koontz

There's never any telling what you'll say or do next, except that it's bound to be something astonishing. By God, sir, you are a character. — John Huston

A great thing is happening on cable TV. You see characters change in stories over years, like in Tolstoy. That's a whole, thrilling new form that I really enjoy. They are Tolstoy-an in their endless character development and narrative changes ... a show like 'Breaking Bad' is astonishing. — Mike Nichols

Gabriel Levin's book is a journey through time and through entrenched animosities of the Middle East. What's astonishing and refreshing is his ability to combine the reporter's perspective with a deep knowledge of poetry, including pre-Islamic Arab poems. A brilliant poet is at work here-a poet in the rugged landscape of conflict and pain. — Adam Zagajewski

I tell you," he [Milosevic] continued, "Izetbegovic has earned Sarajevo by not abandoning it. He's one tough guy. It's his". These words were probably the most astonishing and unexpected of the conference. — Richard Holbrooke

Constitutional democracy has created astonishing and apparently irreversible social progress. All we're interested in is talking about when government doesn't work. — Tony Kushner

A man may perform astonishing feats and comprehend a vast amount of knowledge, and yet have no understanding of himself. But suffering directs a man to look within. If it succeeds, then there, within him, is the beginning of his learning. — Soren Kierkegaard

It is astonishing how much the word infinitely is misused: everything is infinitely more beautiful, infinitely better, etc. The concept must have something pleasing about it, or its misuse could not have become so general. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

The first surprise is that people's guesses are much more accurate than they would be by chance. I find this astonishing. A sense of cognitive ease is apparently generated by a very faint signal from the associative machine, which "knows" that the three words are coherent (share an association) long before the association is retrieved. — Daniel Kahneman

How little one knows, really, about anything! And how grossly incurious one remains about so many things, what an enormous number of intrinsically astonishing achievements one merely takes for granted! — Aldous Huxley

The stories my pupils told me were astonishing. One told how he had witnessed his cousin being shot in the back five times; another how his parents had died of AIDS. Another said that he'd probably been to more funerals than parties in his young life. For me - someone who had had an idyllic, happy childhood - this was staggering. — Erin Gruwell

Without doubt, matter is unlimited in extent, and, in this sense, infinite; and the forces of Nature mould it into an innumerable number of worlds. Would it be at all astonishing if, from the universal dice-box, out of an innumberable number of throws, there should be thrown out one world infinitely perfect? Nay, does not the calculus of probabilities prove to us that one such world out of an infinite number, must be produced of necessity? — William Batchelder Greene

If I scribbled a few words on a cocktail napkin and showed it to my family, they'd proclaim it astonishing and more culturally relevant than the Bible. — Marisha Pessl

Then a sound came. It was like the grinding of gears on a colossal ship engine. The sound was like mountains of iron scraping and rubbing against each other, forced together by some godlike impulse. Uselessly, I covered my ears. It went on and on, and I felt as though I would never again know peace. My senses were consumed by the light and heat and sound, their power interrupted only by the tactile sensation of my heart pounding against my chest. It will be very difficult for you to really grasp what happened next. I warn you that my description will inevitably fall far from conveying the astonishing sight I witnessed. Nevertheless, I shall endeavor to convey some sense of what happened. — Alec Merta

Our own intellectual shortfalls and perplexities do not alter the fact of God's astonishing foreknowledge, which takes into account our choices for which we are responsible. Amid the mortal and fragmentary communiques and the breaking news of the day concerning various human conflicts, God lives in an eternal now where the past, present, and future are constantly before Him (see D&C 130:7). — Neal A. Maxwell

If the cells and fibres in one human brain were all stretched out end to end, they would certainly reach to the moon and back. Yet the fact that they are not arranged end to end enabled man to go there himself. The astonishing tangle within our heads makes us what we are. — Colin Blakemore

To have the external pressure of a job removed is very astonishing. Your own will is now your only motor and it has no horse-power. Sometimes I think that perhaps the most competent business men, and lawyers and doctors, who must be at the office at nine o'clock every morning, do not realize this and take more credit for initiative and industry than they deserve. And it is why all the bright women of the world, who if more were expected of them, might do important work, but who instead have a chronic feeling of ineffectiveness and sloth. — Brenda Ueland

Most astonishing of all to the citizens of Constantinople, however, was the emperor's habit of wandering in disguise through the streets of the capital, questioning those he met about their concerns and ensuring that merchants were charging fair prices for their wares. Once a week, accompanied by the blare of trumpets, he would ride from one end of the city to the other, encouraging any who had complaints to seek him out. Those who stopped him could be certain of a sympathetic ear no matter how powerful their opponent. One story tells of a widow who approached the emperor and made the startling claim that the very horse he was riding had been stolen from her by a senior magistrate of the city. Theophilus dutifully looked into the matter, and when he discovered that the widow was correct, he had the magistrate flogged and told his watching subjects that justice was the greatest virtue of a ruler.* — Lars Brownworth

When true forgiveness happens it is one of the most astonishing and liberating of the human experience. — Richard Holloway

There was a pause. Then she smiled and the corners of her mouth drooped and an almost imperceptible sway brought her closer to him, looking up into his eyes. A lump rose in Dexter's throat, and he waited breathless for the experiment, facing the unpredictable compound that would form mysteriously from the elements of their lips. Then he saw
she communicated her excitement to him, lavishly, deeply, with kisses that were not a promise but a fulfillment. They aroused in him not hunger demanding renewal but surfeit that would demand more surfeit ... kisses that were like charity, creating want by holding back nothing at all. — F Scott Fitzgerald

It is astonishing and a little sad to realize how many discoveries, how many advancements, have been delayed for years, for decades, not because the information was unavailable but because of sheer cowardice, fear of being laughed at, of being ostracized by one's colleagues. — Hanya Yanagihara

For white men, to live is to own, or to try to own more, or to die trying to own more. Their appetites are astonishing! They own wardrobes, slaves, carriages, houses, warehouses, and ships. They own ports, cities, plantations, valleys, mountains, chains of islands. They own this world, its jungles, its skies, and its seas. Yet they complain that Dejima is a prison. They complain they are not free. — David Mitchell

But even as every promise was broken, the party kept on gaining followers. Many were idealists, some were opportunists, others thugs. They displayed astonishing faith and almost fanatical conviction, sometimes even after they themselves had ended up being devoured by the party machinery. A — Frank Dikotter

The Republican abuse of the term feminism in the past decade or so is an astonishing lesson in the politically opportunistic use of language. — Nina Power

It seems so odd to me, an odyssey
How honesty is honestly the rarest thing upon us
Its astonishing. — Asher Roth

I discovered an astonishing truth: God is attracted to weakness. He can't resist those who humbly and honestly admit how desperately they need him. Our weakness, in fact, makes room for his power. — Jim Cymbala

It is astonishing how much more people are interested in lengthening life than improving it. — Charles Caleb Colton

It was an astonishing fantasy but it showed me what even apparently sensible people can believe if they really want to. I — John Cleese

Some primary reasons that both Plato and Aristotle had for believing in God were utterly erroneous - simple errors caused by our being stuck to the planet and misled by the sensation that the planet is standing still. If they had been aware that the Earth spins, they would have understood that, by and large, we are making our own light show in the night sky. As it was, the precision of the movements of all the stars seemed astonishing. If we knew how we lined up among the planets, their motion would not seem so strange and willful. Also, had the philosophers been able to leave planet Earth for a jaunt in outer space, they could have seen that, at a distance from gravity and atmosphere, moving things tend to keep moving, without any need for an impelling force. From out there, the motion of the planets would seem natural as well. — Jennifer Michael Hecht

I saw a woman who physically and spiritually blocked out the definition of being celestial, and replaced it with her own divine beauty. She was transcendent. She was beyond astonishing in her presence. But what she truly did, which was beyond the scope of an average woman's power, was step above the barriers of reality and illusion with her pure, majestic, and omnipotent beauty. — Lionel Suggs

When I read poetry, I want to feel myself suddenly larger ... in touch with - or at least close to - what I deem magical, astonishing. I want to experience a kind of wonderment. And when you report back to your own daily world after experiencing the strangeness of a world sort of recombined and reordered in the depths of a poet's soul, the world looks fresher somehow. Your daily world has been taken out of context. It has the voice of the poet written all over it, for one thing, but it also seems suddenly more alive ... — Mark Strand

Conscience is the voice of the soul, the passions are the voice of the body. Is it astonishing that often these two languages contradict each other, and then to which must we listen? Too often reason deceives us; we have only too much acquired the right of refusing to listen to it; but conscience never deceives us; it is the true guide of man; it is to man what instinct is to the body; which follows it, obeys nature, and never is afraid of going astray. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

In an age that valued prolonged and detailed exposition, complexity, and repetition it was astonishing that Luther should have instinctively discerned the value of brevity. — Andrew Pettegree

When we were left alone in the stone-flagged kitchen, it was astonishing how rapidly that sprained ankle recovered. — Arthur Conan Doyle

That in effect was love. It struck him as astonishing. The word was so little in his vocabulary ... — Ford Madox Ford

I feel vulnerable every day to the grace of God as expressed in every living thing. I feel vulnerable to the astonishing beauty of being alive and to Mother Nature. I feel positive when I feel vulnerable, because it's another reminder that it's not all about me and about my ego. And I actually think it's courageous to be vulnerable, and it's not something to be avoided. — Brad Willis

It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak. — James A. Baldwin

These people walk by a widow deformed by leprosy ... walk by children dressed in rags living in the street, and they think, 'Business as usual.' But if they perceive a slight against God, it is a different story. Their faces go red, their chests heave mightily, they sputter angry words. The degree of their indignation is astonishing. Their resolve is frightening. — Yann Martel

The world is an astonishing place, and the idea that we have in our possession the basic tools needed to understand it is no more credible now than it was in Aristotle's day. — Thomas Nagel

An immune system of enormous complexity is present in all vertebrate animals. When we place a population of lymphocytes from such an animal in appropriate tissue culture fluid, and when we add an antigen, the lymphocytes will produce specific antibody molecules, in the absense of any nerve cells. I find it astonishing that the immune system embodies a degree of complexity which suggests some more or less superficial though striking analogies with human language, and that this cognitive system has evolved and functions without assistance of the brain. — Niels Kaj Jerne

To be loved is a privilege and prize equivalent to being born. If you're smart, you pause regularly to bask in the astonishing knowledge that there are many people out there who care for you and want you to thrive and hold you in their thoughts with fondness. — Rob Brezsny

By 1948, the Italians had begun to pull themselves together, demonstrating once more their astonishing ability to cope with disaster which is so perfectly balanced by their absolute inability to deal with success — Gore Vidal

It's astonishing how folks can get so worked up over something that doesn't exist. — Margaret Atwood

Interchanges between the senses are frequent and astonishing: One knows the smell of a low B flat, the sound of green, the taste of the categorical imperative (which is something like veal). No — Oliver Sacks

Science is the global civilization of which I am a citizen. The spread of its democratic ethic and its unifying powers provides my faith in humanity. The astonishing depths of wonders in the universe, continuously revealed by science is my temple. The capacity of the informed human mind, liberated at last by the understanding that we are alone and thus the sole stewards of earth, is my religion. The potential of humanity to turn this planet into a paradise for future generations is my afterlife. — E. O. Wilson

Warm-bloodedness is one of the key factors that have enabled mammals to conquer the Earth, and to develop the most complex bodies in the animal kingdom. In this series, we will travel the world to discover just how varied and how astonishing mammals are. — David Attenborough

It's astonishing in this world how things don't turn out at all the way you expect them to. — Agatha Christie

The fact that someone came forward and offered $1.25 million to make a movie was astonishing. We were also allowed to keep many of the original stage cast. — Richard O'Brien

Religion enjoys astonishing privileges in our societies, privileges denied to almost any other special interest group one can think of-and certainly denied to individuals — Richard Dawkins

The Shakespeare that Shakespeare became is the name that's attached to these astonishing objects that he left behind. — Stephen Greenblatt

We tend to focus our attention at Christmas on the infancy of Christ.
The greater truth of the holiday is His deity.
More astonishing than a baby in the manger is the truth that this promised baby
is the omnipotent Creator of the heavens and the earth! — John F. MacArthur

I'm very fond of an old map of London that used to belong to my father. I'm a big London fan, and the evolution of the city is astonishing, when you look back to Pepys and how small it was - everyone knew each other. — Ben Schott

Once upon a time in the dead of winter in the Dakota Territory, Theodore Roosevelt took off in a makeshift boat down the Little Missouri River in pursuit of a couple of thieves who had stolen his prized rowboat. After several days on the river, he caught up and got the draw on them with his trusty Winchester, at which point they surrendered. Then Roosevelt set off in a borrowed wagon to haul the thieves cross-country to justice. They headed across the snow-covered wastes of the Badlands to the railhead at Dickinson, and Roosevelt walked the whole way, the entire 40 miles. It was an astonishing feat, what might be called a defining moment in Roosevelt's eventful life. But what makes it especially memorable is that during that time, he managed to read all of Anna Karenina. I often think of that when I hear people say they haven't time to read. — David McCullough

Like many of us left here I thought I knew you. Now I discover that in your company it is myself I know. That is the astonishing gift of your art and your friendship: You gave us ourselves to think about, to cherish. — Toni Morrison

I'm not for pretending that bad stuff doesn't exist, and a passion for justice and truth is a libertarian trait. But the idea of liberty should also reveal new forms of beauty in the world, astonishing evidence of order without dictate, lovely examples of innovation without planning, and other magical things. Surely these deserve some attention too. — Jeffrey Tucker

Fate forces its way to the powerful and violent. With subservient obedience it will assume for years dependency on one individual:Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon, because it loves the elemental human being who grows to resemble it, the intangible element. Sometimes, and these are the most astonishing moments in world history, the thread of fate falls into the hands of a complete nobody but only for a twitching minute. — Stefan Zweig

running to and fro with trays of refreshments. Odo, who knew that his mother lived in the Duke's palace, had vaguely imagined that his father's death must have plunged its huge precincts into silence and mourning; but as he followed the abate up successive flights of stairs and down long corridors full of shadow he heard a sound of dance music below and caught the flash of girandoles through the antechamber doors. The thought that his father's death had made no difference to any one in the palace was to the child so much more astonishing than any of the other impressions crowding his brain, that these were scarcely felt, and he passed as in a dream through rooms where servants were quarrelling over cards and waiting-women rummaged in wardrobes full of perfumed finery, to a bedchamber in which a lady dressed in weeds sat disconsolately at supper. "Mamma! Mamma!" he cried, springing — Edith Wharton

On days like this you can see into the bluest depth of things, their previously unknown, astonishing equations - you see them in even the most familiar everyday thing. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

A breeze ruffled the neat hedges of Privet Drive, which lay silent and tidy under the inky sky, the very last place you would expect astonishing things to happen. Harry Potter rolled over inside his blankets without waking up. One small hand closed on the letter beside him and he slept on, not knowing he was special, not knowing he was famous, not knowing he would be woken in a few hours' time by Mrs. Dursley's scream as she opened the front door to put out the milk bottles, nor that he would spend the next few weeks being prodded and pinched by his cousin Dudley ... He couldn't know that at this very moment, people meeting in secret all over the country were holding up their glasses and saying in hushed voices: To Harry Potter - the boy who lived! — J.K. Rowling

The pace of digital innovation is astonishing. It's impossible to imagine life without the web, smartphones, social networks. And yet the consumer products and everyday objects all around us are still essentially dumb. — Andy Hobsbawm

It remains an astonishing, disturbing fact that in America - a nation where nearly every new drug is subjected to rigorous scrutiny as a potential carcinogen, and even the bare hint of a substance's link to cancer ignites a firestorm of public hysteria and media anxiety - one of the most potent and common carcinogens known to humans can be freely bought and sold at every corner store for a few dollars. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

The stories in Dawn Raffel's astonishing Further Adventures in the Restless Universe as as sharp and bright as stars. — Elissa Schappell

I just admire people like Woody Allen, who every year writes an original screenplay. It's astonishing. I always wished that I could do that. — Francis Ford Coppola

What's so astonishing about not understanding? There are so many things in art, beginning with art itself, that one doesn't understand. A painter doesn't see everything that he has put in his painting. — Henri Matisse

Our present condition, is, Legislation without law; wisdom without a plan; constitution without a name; and, what is strangely astonishing, perfect Independance contending for dependance. — Thomas Paine

I could never have conceived that I would ever get to work in a Truffaut film. It was astonishing to me, and still is. I felt like an old pro, but it was still so unexpected. — Jacqueline Bisset

It is astonishing what a lot of odd minutes one can catch during the day, if one really sets about it. — Dinah Maria Mulock

... hearts wrung with anguish, the anguish of having children, a vulnerability as astonishing as the capacity for love that parenthood brings. — Jeffrey Eugenides

What matters here are the works - finally without them his life would be uninteresting. What matters, that is, are the astonishing things that he left behind. If we can get the life in relation to the works, then it can take off. — Stephen Greenblatt

Take just one well-known event: The Beatles' 1964 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. This has been depicted with astonishing regularity as a pivotal cultural moment; in fact an entire movie -- I Wanna Hold Your Hand -- was built around it. And that Sullivan episode was indeed a major event in popular culture. But did you know that in 1961, 26 million people watched a CBS live broadcast of the first performance of a new symphony by classical composer Aaron Copland? Moreover, with all the attention that sixties rock groups receive, it may come as a surprise to learn that My Fair Lady was Columbia Records' biggest-selling album before the 1970s, beating out those of sixties icons Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and The Byrds. — Jonathan Leaf

The poor Sufi dressed in rags walked into a jewelry store owned by a rich merchant and asked him, "Do you know how you're going to die." And the Sufi said, "I do.""How?" asked the merchant.
And the Sufi lay down, crossed his arms, said, "Like this," and died, whereupon the merchant promptly gave up his store to live a life of poverty in pursuit of the kind of spiritual wealth the dead Sufi had acquired. — John Green

John Kite was the first person I'd ever met who made me feel normal. That when i talked "too much," it was not the point where you walked away, going, "You're weird, Johanna," or "Shut up, Johanna" - but that was when the conversation actually got good. The more ridiculous things I said - the more astonishing things I confessed - the more he roared with laughter, or slapped the table and said: "That is exactly how it is, you outrageous item. — Caitlin Moran

I am myself so exceedingly Nordic, as far as physical constitution is concerned, that I can enjoy almost any weather except what is called glorious weather. At the end of a few days, I am left wondering how the men of the Mediterranean ever managed to do almost all the most active and astonishing things that have been done. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

No creaking gates, no gothic towers, no shuttered windows. Yet for the past ten months this house has been the focus of an astonishing barrage of supernatural activity. — Michael Parkinson

When Galileo made his astonishing discovery of mountains on the moon, his telescope didn't actually have enough magnifying power to support that finding. Instead, he recognized the zigzag pattern separating the light and dark areas of the moon. Other astronomers were looking through similar telescopes, but only Galileo "was able to appreciate the implications of the dark and light regions," Simonton notes. He had the necessary depth of experience in physics and astronomy, but also breadth of experience in painting and drawing. Thanks to artistic training in a technique called chiaroscuro, which focuses on representations of light and shade, Galileo was able to detect mountains where others did not. — Adam M. Grant

We need to reverse three centuries of walling the for-profit and non-profit sectors off from one another. When you think for-profit and non-profit, you most often think of entities with either zero social return or zero return on capital and zero social return. Clearly, there's some opportunity in the spectrum between those extremes. What's missing is the for-profit finance industry coming in to that area. Look at the enormous diversity of the for-profit financial industry as opposed to monolithic nature of the non-profit world; it's quite astonishing. — Bill Drayton

Being more aware will enable you to have only astonishing impressions, avoiding any of the disappointing experiences like some of those we went through. — Sahara Sanders

That wouldn't be a first, now would it?"
"Jean."
"Jean Grey is dead, Agent."
"Yeah, that'll last. — Joss Whedon

For after all, what is man in creation? Is he not a mere cipher compared with the infinite, a whole compared to the nothing, a mean between zero & all, infinitely remote from understanding of either extreme? Who can follow these astonishing processes? The Author of these wonders understands them, but no one else can. — Blaise Pascal

he said this turning his strong body to face the beautiful, stunning, breathtaking, astonishing, bewildering girl who was a princess and his one true love, Eodwyn. she had hair like raven wings and skin like snow that the dogs haven't peed on yet and cheeks like cherry blossoms and eyes like a magnificent summer sky. — J.K. Ashton

When, in 2012, Newt Gingrich was asked about how his religious beliefs would affect his conduct should he become president, the Republican nominee hopeful answered, "One of the reasons I am running is there has been an increasingly aggressive war against religion and in particular against Christianity" in the United States. For a potential president to state that he sees himself as a wartime candidate who will defend his party against other citizens is astonishing. There is not even a pretense here of "united states". — Candida R. Moss

Four elements, Hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen, also provide an example of the astonishing togetherness of our universe. They make up the "organic" molecules that constitute living organisms on a planet, and the nuclei of these same elements interact to generate the light of its star. Then the organisms on the planet come to depend wholly on that starlight, as they must if life is to persist. So it is that all life on the Earth runs on sunlight. [Referring to photosynthesis] — George Wald

The earth's warmth under me, as I stretch out at night, is astonishing. It is like the warmth of another body that has absorbed the sun all day and now gives out again its store of heat. It is softer, darker than I could ever have believed, and when I take a handful of it and smell its extraordinary odors, I know suddenly what it is I am composed of, as if the energy that is in this fistful of black soil had suddenly opened, between my body and it, as between it and the green stalks, some corridor along which our common being flowed. — David Malouf

I moistened my lips. His gaze fixed on them. I think I stopped breathing.
He jerked so sharply away that his long dark coat sliced air, and turned his back to me. "Was that an invitation, Ms.Lane?"
"If it was?" I asked, astonishing myself. What did I think I was doing?
"I don't do hypotheticals. Little girl. — Karen Marie Moning