We can be very sure that as we discover new aspects of the expanding and evolving universe, we will be startled and amazed once again.

One of those quiet types who logs a lot of time in the bedlam of her head, I sometimes need to be startled awake to the fact that the outside world still exists.

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.

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.

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

Some years ago, I was introduced to Nicole Kidman and I curtseyed! I'm sure she doesn't remember but she looked a bit startled. You can't do anything about it once it's done but it's hard to recover from that.

I'm still startled when people ask me for writing advice.

My mother couldn't take having three boys. She was extremely jumpy, to say the least. Any noise startled her. The sound of a pot dropping on the ground could make her hit the ceiling.

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

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.

I became startled by the extraordinary difference between something whose surface is completely invisible which only makes itself present by virtue of what it reflects, and a window, which doesn't make itself apparent at all, in the ideal case.

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.

The world in general doesn't know what to make of originality; it is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

When things are going bad, don't get all bummed out. Don't get startled; don't get frustrated. If you can say the word 'good,' guess what? It means you're still alive. It means you're still breathing.