Unexpected Places Quotes & Sayings

Our families need to ask for the gift of the Spirit! Through prayer, even in the busiest times, we give time back to God, we find the peace that comes from appreciating the important things, and we encounter the joy of God's unexpected gifts. Through daily prayer may our homes become, like the house of Martha and Mary, places where Jesus always finds a warm welcome. — Pope Francis

An odd place to meet - " To Harry's immense disquiet, Snape's black eyes flicked to the doorways on either side of them, and then to the one-eyed witch. "We're not - meeting here," said Harry. "We just - met here." "Indeed?" said Snape. "You have a habit of turning up in unexpected places, Potter, and you are very rarely there for no good reason. ... I suggest the pair of you return to Gryffindor Tower, where you belong. — J.K. Rowling

It turns out most of the conclusions that I've come to in life have equally valid contradictions. I think it's true you need to make a plan, set a goal and stick to it, but I would also advise: Don't keep your eyes so fixed on your goal that you miss what sneaks up to surprise you, because magic will come from unexpected places. — Paul Reiser

... he'd assumed their relationship would go on forever. It was going on now, but in another way, like the rearrangement of the stars, which were all still in the sky, just burning in unexpected places. — Graham Spaid

Love comes from the most unexpected places. — Barbra Streisand

Rehana regarded the saris and tried to recall the feeling they had given her, of being at once enveloped and set free, the tight revolutions of material around her hips and legs limiting movement, the empty space between blouse and petticoat permitting unexpected sensations -- the thrill of a breeze that has strayed low, through an open window, the knowledge of heat in strange places, the back, the exposed belly. It was the bringing together of night and day.... — Tahmima Anam

I many times encountered courage, real courage. Undeniable courage. I've heard it said that that was the highest quality of the human animal. I encountered that many times, in unexpected places. And I have learned to recognize it when I see it. — Dorothea Lange

Don't let anyone make you believe that without their support you can't make it, hey look up, help is coming from unexpected places. Cheer up! — Bernard Kelvin Clive

A life lived as variously as Roger's, and evoked in writing as powerful as his, means that even after death his influence continues to flow outwards. Green Man-like, he appears in unexpected places, speaking in leaves. — Robert Macfarlane

Prayers are answered in ways we don't choose. The river of grace bubbles up in unexpected places. — Lisa Wingate

My hope, for all future generations, is that they will have (in addition to sunshine, fresh air, clean water, and fertile soil) a somewhat slower pace of life, with plenty of time to pause, in quiet places . . . haunted places - everyday, accessible places, open to the public - places that are not too radically transformed over time - places susceptible of cultivation, where people can express their caring, and nature can respond - places with tough, gnarled roots and tangled stalks, with digging mammals and noisy birds - places of common remembrance and hopeful guidance - places of unexpected encounters - places that breed solidarity across difference - places where children can walk in the footsteps of those who have gone before - places that are perpetually up for adoption - places that have been humanized but not conquered or commodified - places that foster a kind of connectedness both mournful and celebratory. — Aaron Sachs

if our style of looking becomes beautiful, then beauty will become visible and shine forth for us. We will be surprised to discover beauty in unexpected places where the ungraceful eye would never linger. The graced eye can glimpse beauty anywhere, for beauty does not reserve itself for special elite moments or instances; it does not wait for perfection but is present already secretly in everything. When we beautify our gaze, the grace of hidden beauty becomes our joy and our sanctuary. — John O'Donohue

The road itself is informative, because it forces you to respond spontaneously and to encounter the unexpected. It forces you to reassess what you felt about people or issues or places, and it forces you to live in the present. — Gloria Steinem

When you see beauty all around you, beauty will seek and find you, even in the most unexpected places. — Alberto Villoldo

Sometimes the things you've lost can be found again in unexpected places. — Lemony Snicket

The best minds come from the most unexpected faces and places. There is no image for intelligence or genius. Genius is something that cannot be seen. It cannot be produced or manufactured. It is something that even the true genius thinks is unattainable. The genius recognizes he's just a small pea in a sea of infinite atoms. Knowledge is as infinite as the universe. The man who claims to know all, only reveals to all that he really knows nothing. — Suzy Kassem

Our minds are like the universe. How do we know what's hidden in some corner of that space? Beyond the galaxies we know. To places where light doesn't travel...We feel, write, think and argue about what we see. But the unknown exists and sometimes, makes an unexpected appearance. I experienced a part of that unknown through a man. — Chitrangada Mukherjee

Life takes us to unexpected places sometimes. The future is never set in stone, remember that. — Erin Morgenstern

Visiting a new town is like having a conversation. Places ask questions of you just as searchingly as you question them. And, as in any conversation, it helps to listen with an open mind, so you can be led somewhere unexpected. The more you leave assumptions at home, I've found, the better you can hear whatever it is that a destination is trying to say to you. — Pico Iyer

It occurs to me, in fact, that laughter has much in common with prayer. In both acts, we stand on equal ground, freely acknowledging ourselves as fallen creatures. We take ourselves less seriously. We think of our creatureliness. Work divides and ranks; laughter and prayer unite. Finding God in Unexpected Places(245 — Philip Yancey

the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas. — Peter Thiel

A vast number of people bemoan the lack of love in their lives and one must wonder if it's because they're looking for a "type" or have a list of requirements that someone else has to meet first, in which case it's no wonder that they miss out, because when you love, it's not that all that you were looking for is found in another, it's that the person you love ends up making you see they are what you wanted all along; love, after all, is usually found in unforeseen places with the most unexpected people. — Donna Lynn Hope

Look for strength in unexpected places. — Catherine Ryan Hyde

Love can be found in unexpected places. Sometimes we go out searching for what we think we want and we end up with what we're supposed to have. — Kate McGahan

I get the biggest enjoyment from the random and unexpected places. Linux on cellphones or refrigerators, just because it's so not what I envisioned it. Or on supercomputers. — Linus Torvalds

It's funny how, when things seem the darkest, moments of beauty present themselves in the most unexpected places. — Karen Marie Moning

In terms of negotiating a career - I've always grown up being an insider and an outsider to different worlds, across different classes and cultures, so I have always naturally liked making films or music that puts things in unexpected places. — Riz Ahmed

I feel a reassuring oneness with other people when I find that even my most intimate, anguished, socially inadmissible emotions and desires are known to others ... Kindred souls - indeed, my selves otherwise costumed - turn up in books in the most unexpected places. Discovering them is one of the great rewards of a liberal education. If I quote liberally, it is not to show off book learning, which at my stage of life can only invite ridicule, but rather to bathe in this kinship of strangers. — Yi-Fu Tuan

There are almost unlimited possibilities for making discoveries and to uncover the unknown. It is in the nature of the discovery that it can not be planned or programmed. On the contrary it consists of surprises and appears many times in the most unexpected places. — Bengt I. Samuelsson

The honest investigator must be prepared to follow wherever the search of truth may lead. Truth is often found in the most unexpected places. He must, with fearless and open mind insist that facts are far more important than any cherished, mistaken beliefs, no matter how unpleasant the facts or how delightful the beliefs. — Hugh B. Brown

Fair, rich confusion is all the aim of an old-fashioned flower garden, and the greater the confusion, the richer. You want to come upon mignonnette in unexpected places, and to find sprays of heliotrope in close consultation with your roses, and geraniums sporting their uniforms like gay recruits off duty. — Anna Bartlett Warner

I always say the next big thing will happen in unexpected places - up and coming cities that aren't necessarily boom markets. — Anna Sui

I appreciate all of the unexpected places, internal and external, that my writing has taken me. — Terry Tempest Williams

True love can blossom in unexpected places. This is Jaden pretending not to notice. — Katie Klein

The wages of sin are the hardest debts on earth to pay, and they are always collected at inconvenient times and unexpected places. — Gene Stratton-Porter

New fashions (of all sorts) come from unexpected places, not from the arbiters of what's correct. — Seth Godin

Life has a sense of humour; it hides its best treasures in unexpected places. — Mensah Oteh

I believe that we need good tale-tellers now, as much as we did when the oral tradition was the only way that they were passed on; that the active transmission of stories plays a vital role in the development of the brain. The quality of the stories that surround us as we grow up is vitally important to our well-being, in the same way as the quality of food and our environment. The most beautiful aspect of this shared story-telling - and we have great examples of this in Tales from the Perilous Realm - is that the collaboration and engagement between teller and audience means that they are embarking on a journey together, which can lead to the most unexpected and wondrous of places. — Alan Lee

Mockingbirds are the true artists of the bird kingdom. Which is to say, although they're born with a song of their own, an innate riff that happens to be one of the most versatile of all ornithological expressions, mocking birds aren't content to merely play the hand that is dealt them. Like all artists, they are out to rearrange reality. Innovative, willful, daring, not bound by the rules to which others may blindly adhere, the mockingbird collects snatches of birdsong from this tree and that field, appropriates them, places them in new and unexpected contexts, recreates the world from the world. For example, a mockingbird in South Carolina was heard to blend the songs of thirty-two different kinds of birds into a ten-minute performance, a virtuoso display that serve no practical purpose, falling, therefore, into the realm of pure art. — Tom Robbins

[I]t is useful at times to admit to yourself that you don't know your way and to be open to help from unexpected places. Doing that makes available to you inner and outer energies and allies that arise out of your own soulfulness and selflessness. [...] [G]etting caught up in the normal human tendencies of self-cherishing and arrogance, and ignoring the larger order of things, will ultimately lead to ans impasse in your life in which you are unable to go forward, unable to go back, and unable to turn around. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Life takes us to unexpected places ... love brings us home. — Unknown Author 770

Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don't exist. — Adam Gopnik

When Mother had told me that animals found quiet, unexposed places to die, I had always imagined they knew they were dying, and accepted it, almost gracefully. Now I saw that this wasn't so at all: they crept into corners in the hope of surviving, they only knew they were weakened and exposed, easy prey, and their instinct was to find a hidden place and try to outlive whatever it was they were suffering. It had been a mistake to imagine they wanted to be alone, to die in peace. Animals have no knowledge of death; for them, death is the unexpected end of life, something they resist by instinct, for no good reason. In that sense, their existence has an almost mechanical quality. — John Burnside

The life she'd led, each of the places she'd called home sending unexpected shoots toward the next, had made her open to almost anything. — Andrea Barrett

It's unexpected for women's issues to be brought up in places other than women's centers on college campuses or crisis places. — Kathleen Hanna

Feedback is a pleasant thing. I get a lot of letters from unexpected people in unexpected places. — Brian Aldiss

Not only does a journey transport us over enormous distances, it also causes us to move a few degrees up or down in the social scale. It displaces us physically and also for better or for worse takes us out of our class context, so that the colour and flavour of certain places cannot be dissociated from the always unexpected social level on which we find ourselves in experiencing them. — Claude Levi-Strauss

My best ideas almost always come from winding up in unexpected places and stumbling across things I never could have imagined in advance. — Damian Kulash

None of these lads here were out getting fighting drunk last night. And thus we wear down mountains. Water dripping on a stone, dissolving and removing. Changing the shape of the world, one drop at a time. Water dripping on a stone, Commander. Water flowing underground, bubbling up in unexpected places. — Terry Pratchett

Sometimes there's no map when you go to new places, you have to make unexpected turns, but the beauty is these places are new. — Christopher Hawke

Screwing up is hardly a major mistake. Sometimes your wrong choices bring you to the right places. — Shannon L. Alder

But this is one of the things that makes rap at its best so human. It doesn't force you to pretend to be only one thing or another, to be a saint or a sinner. It recognizes that you can be true to yourself and still have unexpected dimensions and opposing ideas. Having a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other is the most common thing in the world. The real bullshit is when you act like you don't have contradictions inside you, that you're so dull and unimaginative that your mind never changes or wanders into strange, unexpected places. — Jay-Z

Sometimes answers come at unexpected times, in unexpected ways and unexpected places. — Rob Buyea

One of the things I think is unique and signature about Blizzard is that whenever they do their games, and with Warcraft in particular, they take the things they love and put a twist on it. They showed that heroes can come from the most unexpected places, and as a player, you can play as a hero, on all sides. — Duncan Jones

You will find friends in unexpected places. Listen to what midnight tells you. — Erin Hunter

See beauty in those unexpected places. (she asked herself how people could let Bach be background noise.) See the opportunity in what looks like inconvenience. (she steered clear of the traffic jam and went to the bakery she's been meaning to stop at.) She embraces the undeclared possibility in what seems like just another ordinary day. (her friend is scheduled for cancer surgery and suddenly everything around her seems so very precious.) — Mary Anne Radmacher

Mom and Dad were killed in a car accident on their way home from the tournament." Mr. Terupt's eyes were moist, but he kept going. "Fortunately, I was headed to college, which was the best place for me. Wrestling saved my life. The challenge it provided kept me going when I could have easily given up. I have no brothers or sisters, or any other extended family, so I was alone after my parents died. You saw that last year at the hospital. But now I have all of you. Sometimes answers come at unexpected times, in unexpected ways and unexpected places. I never — Rob Buyea

The thing about love was that it caught you unawares, turned up in the most unexpected places, even when you weren't looking for it. — Sarra Manning

The Christian life, and especially the contemplative life, is a continual discovery of Christ in new and unexpected places. — Thomas Merton

In my books, there is always a prince, and he always happens upon the damsel in the most unexpected places. — MarcyKate Connolly

The proponents of Marxian biology appear in unexpected places. In the early disputes over evolution, the most effective aid to the Marxian line came from the humanitarian but conservative Christians, who not only rejected evolution on theological grounds, but who also looked with horror on the amoral viciousness of what they took to be natural selection. Marx himself had also objected to the competitive aspects of natural selection, so both his followers and the more conservative religious groups found themselves on the same side. In fact, the Marxian biologists of the last seventy-five years had their pathways made smooth by the Victorian fundamentalists. — Conway Zirkle

Watch your back, little wolf, they say. Enemies arise from unexpected places. — Marie Lu

Readers will recall that the little evidence collected seemed to point to the strange and confusing figure of an unidentified Air Force pilot whose body was washed ashore on a beach near Dieppe three months later. Other traces of his 'mortal remains' were found in a number of unexpected places: in a footnote to a paper on some unusual aspects of schizophrenia published thirty years earlier in a since defunct psychiatric journal; in the pilot for an unpurchased TV thriller, 'Lieutenant 70'; and on the record labels of a pop singer known as The Him - to instance only a few. Whether in fact this man was a returning astronaut suffering from amnesia, the figment of an ill-organized advertising campaign, or, as some have suggested, the second coming of Christ, is anyone's guess. — J.G. Ballard

Guilt implanted at a tender age is not easy to destroy. A weed, it sprouts in unexpected places. — Caryl Rivers

I want to go to places that are unexpected of me because people really think they have me pegged. — Lee Daniels

Sometimes a hero can be found in the most unexpected of places. That's when you must say to him, "Get out of my kitchen, silly! Don't you have some monsters to fight?" - The Hero's Guide to Being a Hero — Christopher Healy

Just when we think we have our own stories figured out, heroes arise in the most unexpected places. — Camron Wright

I love Mikhail Bulgakov. He is very original and takes the story to unexpected places. I didn't realise political writing could be so funny. — Denise Mina

Life takes you to unexpected places. Love brings you home. — Melissa McClone

It was one of those delightfully irregular houses where you go up and down steps out of one room into another, and where you come upon more rooms when you think you have seen all there are, and where there is a bountiful provision of little halls and passages, and where you find still older cottage-rooms in unexpected places, with lattice windows and green growth pressing through them. — Charles Dickens

Yes, the world was very strange. But you had to walk through. That was the trick. You had to keep walking through, always, with your chin held high, the way she had passed through the tunnels of the underworld, with only the dim light of the lumpen to guide her. That was the other trick, the other truth: Light would come to you from unexpected places. — Lauren Oliver

Sometimes help comes from unexpected places. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

If we stretch ourselves to open our minds, to see our shared humanity with others, we allow ourselves to see the existence of community and generosity in unexpected places. — Sharon Salzberg