A Quote by Joyce Carol Oates

Sometimes people surprise us. People we believe we know. — © Joyce Carol Oates
Sometimes people surprise us. People we believe we know.
It was a such a surprise, such an absolute shocking surprise to me to not know what you're doing and to find out that this thing that you don't even know how to do, that you're sure you don't know how to do, speaks to so many people and touches so many people in some way.
I think people are more apt to believe photographs, especially if it’s something fantastic. They’re willing to be more gullible. Sometimes they want fantasy. Even if they know it’s fake they can believe anything. People are accustomed to being told what to believe in.
Maria did teach us a lot. It taught us to value what we have: our friends, our neighbors, and those who helped us. I know my people in PR are active. It took us by surprise, but we are warriors, and we are ready for any adversity.
It should be no surprise that when rich men take control of the government, they pass laws that are favorable to themselves. The surprise is that those who are not rich vote for such people, even though they should know from bitter experience that the rich will continue to rip off the rest of us.
The essence of comedy, drama, and horror is surprise. I have an uncanny ability to surprise people because they look at my face, and they don't know where I'm going.
Sometimes people can surprise you. Sometimes they have a great capacity to hear the truth.
You might ask yourself why you want to surprise your readers in the first place. A surprise ending is sort of like a surprise party. Probably some people, somewhere, enjoy having friends and trusted colleagues lunge at them in the sudden blinding light of their own living room, but I don't think most of us do.
People are just too hopeful, and sometimes hope is the biggest weapon of all to use against us. People will believe anything.
I used to believe that it was not possible to lose someone I loved without sensing it somehow, without feeling something shift. But it's not true. People can die, sometimes the closest people to us, without us noticing a thing.
One of the tricky things about running a TV show is that you just never know how good the guest stars you cast on a weekly basis, how good they're going to be in the episode. Sometimes they surprise you in good ways and sometimes they surprise you in disappointing ways.
I really feel like sometimes I'll write these songs, and I'll just think, 'You know that couldn't have come from me alone.' I believe that God inspires us. I believe that He gives us gifts and talents, and it's up to us to develop them and choose what we do with them.
Not only don't I know who I am, but I'm very suspicious of people who do know who they are. I am sometimes ten or twelve people a day, and sometimes four or five people an hour!
A first fact should surprise us, or rather would surprise us if we were not used to it. How does it happen there are people who do not understand mathematics? If mathematics invokes only the rules of logic, such as are accepted by all normal minds...how does it come about that so many persons are here refractory?
I try to love my neighbor as myself but I'm not trying to be a people pleaser. Sometimes that's hard, because my human nature is to want people to be happy with me. But sometimes I feel my convictions are so great that it would be compromising the truth if I didn't do that. So sometimes it's a struggle to say, "This is what I think; this is what I believe, and if you don't agree with me, oh well." The hardest thing for people to accept is the gay-affirming issue. It's hard for people to agree to disagree on that one.
At first people asked us, 'Can you do it?' And we kept silent because we didn't believe in ourselves, we didn't believe that we could do things. Today people no longer say to us, 'Can you?' They say, 'When can you?' Because the Indians finally believe in themselves, they believe they can do things.
When it comes down to it, it's giving people a good night out in a basic way and I think my company guarantees that. There's always something new and something to excite us and surprise us, and that's why people come back, I hope.
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