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It does surprise me that intelligent people in the 21st century could claim that if you respond to the terrorists with force, you spawn terrorism, but if you appease them, you somehow tame them. This argument, as I said, is very interesting, and very surprising.
It's surprising to me how many of my friends send Christmas cards, or holiday cards, including my atheist and secular friends.
The dream is to keep surprising yourself, never mind the audience.
To find gratitude and generosity when you could reasonably find hurt and resentment will surprise you. It will be so surprising because you will see so much of the opposite: people who have much more than others yet who react with anger when one advantage is lost or with resentment when an added gift is denied.
I always had a sense that I would fall in love with Tokyo. In retrospect I guess it's not that surprising. I was of the generation that had grown up in the '80s when Japan was ascendant (born aloft by a bubble whose burst crippled its economy for decades), and I'd fed on a steady diet of anime and samurai films.
Many a witty inspiration is like the surprising reunion of befriended thoughts after a long separation.
I'm speaking for a bunch of girls when I say that the idea that feminism is completely natural and shouldn't even be something that people find mildly surprising, it's just a part of being a girl in 2013.
I think that London is very much like that. I find there's humour in the air and people are interesting. And I think that it's a place which is constantly surprising. The worst thing about it? I think it can be smug and aggressive.
It's actually very surprising how little we think about the quality of our decision-making and how we could improve it. How absent decision-making classes are from educational curricula. How little we think about how it is we think.
But Saudi Arabia is surprising in a lot of ways. Like any place, or any people, it relentlessly defies easy categorization.