Top 20 Startled Quotes

Once you have become permanently startled, as I am, by the realization that we are a social species, you tend to keep an eye out for the pieces of evidence that this is, by and large, good for us.

When I first began visiting West Germany in the early 1980s, I was startled by the contrast between Birmingham, where I went to school, and affluent Cologne. My host family, the lovely Schumachers, always had an opulent array of grapes on the table; they were better dressed than anyone I knew in Britain.

She jerked away from me like a startled fawn might, if I had a startled fawn and it jerked away from me.

A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.

Not long ago, in an excruciatingly remote village in the Australian Outback, I was startled to see a bartender in a cowboy hat measuring out a classically proportioned French 75 – something he’d picked up on the Internet, he told me.

Take the first step, and your mind will mobilize all its forces to your aid. But the first essential is that you begin. Once the battle is startled, all that is within and without you will come to your assistance.

The separate water foundations, park benches, bathrooms and restaurants of the Jim Crow South startled me. These experiences motivated my lifelong study of the status of African Americans and the sources of improvement in that status.

I wrapped a movie called ‘Zombieland,’ in which I was constantly under assault by zombies, then flew to New York, still very much in character. With my daughter at the airport I was startled by a paparazzo, who I quite understandably mistook for a zombie.

If you could hear the insane stuff going on in my head, it would scare the hell out of you. Probably. Or fascinate you. Depends on how easily you’re startled, I guess.

It is true that I am often startled and even angered and repulsed by the strange directions and provocative content of new forms that seem to pop up every few months.

It’s because we are so flooded with American culture that we’re startled when we see ourselves up there on the screen.

Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring – an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.

We Americans, who invented traffic, are always being startled by the forms into which it has evolved around the world.

A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.

Many people don’t know that New Jersey is a fertile breeding ground for writers, some of them quite renowned. And I would wager that most would be truly startled to learn that the star in the Jersey firmament is – drum roll here – Newark.

I get startled really easily, so I hate horror films. I have to close my eyes when I think something is going to make me jump, because I just scream.

Obama, startled that components of government behave as interest groups, seems utterly unfamiliar with public choice theory. It demystifies and de-romanticizes politics by applying economic analysis – how incentives influence behavior – to government.

Everyone’s opened a drawer and been startled by the unexpected discovery of an old mobile phone that now resembles an outsized pantomime prop. To think you used to be impressed by this clunky breezeblock. You were like a caveman gawping at a yo-yo.

I have designed my style pantomimes as white ink drawings on black backgrounds, so that man’s destiny appears as a thread lost in an endless labyrinth. I have tried to shed some gleams of light on the shadow of man startled by his anguish.

We were married for almost 45 years. We fought all the time, it wasn’t a great love or anything, it wasn’t a great, all-consuming passion. She was just there. A lot of people were startled because we didn’t seem devoted but we were.