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What people can survive and what they don't survive is shocking to me. Someone can go to Iraq and be blown to bits and survive. Someone can trip and fall on the street and they die - that's that.
Sep 10, 2025
Patrick Demarchelier was the one who got me my first Vogue cover. It was French Vogue - I think in ’87 or ’88. I think I was the first black model to be on the cover of French Vogue, which was shocking to me because when I asked them about it, they were like, "Oh, no. We’ve never had that before."
It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes.
It's very shocking for me to see pictures from my win here in 2008. I aged.
The thing I love about working with first-time directors is that it's always quite shocking how little difference there is between them and directors who've been directing all their lives.
I know what I’m doing. I know I’m shocking you.
We live in a world where sort of nothing is shocking anymore.
Some people are asking me questions like this is a more shocking subject, which is so strange.
That's what art is, shocking people. Sometimes shocking yourself.
It's sometimes shocking to find out what people really believe in.
Every moment is a new and shocking transvaluation of all we have ever been.
It's shocking the things we call love.
Real theology is always rather shocking to people who already think they know what they think. I'm still shocked myself.
The fact that people are shocked is the best proof that they need shocking.
Nobody sets out to offend or shock for the sake of shocking. You set out to get laughs.
Gory stuff can be shocking but it doesn’t really scare me. I’d say the kind of stuff that gets under my skin is the unknown. You hear a knock behind a wall and you don’t know what it is. Is there something there or not?
The stench of human wreckage in which the Nazi regime finally sank down to defeat has been the most shocking fact of modern times.
I never thought that someone would be teaching one of my fanzines. I never thought I'd be off to lecture at a college. It's still shocking to me.
If you're going to be a wannabe, make sure you 'wannabe' something great. The most shocking thing about wannabes, is they largely want to be something irrelevant, vein, or just plain petty.
Because one has little fear of shocking vanity in Italy, people adopt an intimate tone very quickly and discuss personal things.
The most shocking act, closely examined, is just a louder version of some habitual gesture.
Oh. To be filled with goodness then shattered by goodness, so beautifully mosaically fragmented by such shocking goodness.
When Bird came on the scene, it was just as shocking as in the Bible: everything was dark, and then the light appeared for the first time.
For exactly the same reason, it is sometimes satisfying to cut yourself and bleed. On those gray [sic] days where eight in the morning looks no different from noon and nothing has happened and nothing is going to happen and you are washing a glass in the sink and it breaks - accidentally - and punctures your skin. And then there is this shocking red, the brightest thing in the day, so vibrant it buzzes, this blood of yours. That is okay sometimes because at least you know you're alive.
Zwarte Piet, or 'Black Pete,' is a relic from slavery. It is something that should have long been eliminated, and it's very insulting to black Dutch people. It's shocking to me that it still exists, but I think it's about the lack of knowledge and education regarding the roots of the character in the slave trade.
Business is not about money. It's about making dreams come true for others and for yourself.
The Internet is a giant international network of intelligent, informed computer enthusiasts, by which I mean, "people without lives." We don't care. We have each other.... While you are destroying your mind watching the worthless, brain-rotting drivel on TV, we on the Internet are exchanging, freely and openly, the most settings, uninhibited, intimate and, yes, shocking details about our "CONFIG.SYS."
There are remuneration packages that will no longer be tolerated because they bear no relation to merit. That those who create jobs and wealth may earn a lot of money is not shocking. But that those who contribute to destroying jobs and wealth also earn a lot of money is morally indefensible.
It's shocking that so many children still live in fear as a result of violence in the home, and don't know who to turn to for help and support. As a child survivor of domestic violence I can remember the fear and isolation. I'm delighted to support the Hideout, the new Women's Aid website for children and young people. I know it could have made a real difference to me and will provide great comfort and support to thousands of children.
The truth is how you say it, and to be 'one's self' is the most shocking custom of all.
When someone sets out to be controversial or provocative or shocking as an end in itself, I don't think that's a noble goal.
I need to push myself. I'm not saying that I just want to do anything that's shocking, but when you have that combination of a script that's really beautiful and extremely shocking, it's exciting for me.
I find it shocking that anybody can be brought down in D.C. for gossip, ostensibly. I thought that was the coin of the realm there. That's like getting hit with lightning on a cloudless day.
This perpetual round of constrained civilities to persons quite indifferent to us, is the most provoking and tiresome thing in theworld, but it is unavoidable in a country town, where everybody is known.... 'Tis a most shocking and unworthy way of spending our precious irrecoverable time, to those who know not its value.
One of the things that was kind of shocking for humans... was to come to terms with was the fact that, hey, we may not be the center of the universe.
The camera can capture thought in a way that's quite surprising and shocking. You can become very simple and minimal in your work and communicate a lot with just a finger or an eyebrow, or a look, or a glance.
[About reading Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, age 14, in the back seat of his parents' sedan. I almost threw up. I got physically ill when I learned that ospreys and peregrine falcons weren't raising chicks because of what people were spraying on bugs at their farms and lawns. This was the first time I learned that humans could impact the environment with chemicals. [That a corporation would create a product that didn't operate as advertised] was shocking in a way we weren't inured to.
How I Shed My Skin is, simply put, a brilliant book. While I was reading, I kept thinking two things. One, this is totally shocking. Two, it's not at all shocking, but a familiar part of my life and memory. Grimsley's narrative is straightforward and plain-spoken while at the same time achingly moving and intimately honest, and it does more to explain the South than anything I've read in a long, long time.
Conversationis like the table of contents of a dull book.... All the greatest subjects of human thought are proudly displayedin it. Listen to it for three minutes, and you ask yourself which is more striking, the emphasis of the speaker or his shocking ignorance.
Bob Dylan, Nobel laureate. A new fact so shocking that even the year's most notable deaths have not outdone it for the volume (in both senses) of instant reaction; so divisive, it makes Brexit, the Labour leadership and the US Presidential election seem lesser ruptures.
It's what the mainstream does - they absorb things and they blunt the power of it. And so the next generation and the next generation has to become more shocking and more provocative in order to get any rise out of anybody.
Beautiful woman wrapped in chadors, with huge machine guns in their hands. Brilliant, shocking, amazingly contradictory images. They compelled me to deeply investigate these ideas.
When I met someone who I thought was really talented, I would just be like, Wow! How did you get that way? And I met a lot of people who would just do anything to claw their way to the top, and it was just shocking and awful for me to see that for the first time. And now I live in Manhattan so I have become desensitized to that.
You can't fake authenticity.
You must not imagine that Papa or I have the least notion of compelling you to marry anyone whom you hold in aversion, for I am sure that such a thing would be quite shocking! And Charles would not do so either, would you, dear Charles?”(Elizabeth Ombersley) “No, certainly not. But neither would I consent to her marriage with any such frippery fellow as Augustus Fawnhope!” “Augustus,” announced Cecilia, putting up her chin, “will be remembered long after you have sunk into oblivion!” “By his creditors? I don’t doubt it.
And I don't know where to find Ashley Danfield and all the other lovely commentators who show me live courtroom trials. To me, you know, I'm obsessed with it. Like I think maybe if I wasn't an actor I'd be a litigator. But, you know, it's always just shocking to see what happens in real life because most of the things that you see on those trials if you tried to write them into a TV series you would say oh gosh, no one would believe that would ever happen. But yet they always do in real life.
To cite my own alma mater, it's shocking to me that Yale University can teach what it teaches at the Yale School of Environmental Studies and utterly fail to mirror those values in any way in its investment practices.
From the essay "Twenty-five Things People Have a Shocking Capacity to Be Surprised by Over and Over Again" 1. Journalists sometimes make things up. 2. Journalists sometimes get things wrong. 3. Almost all books that are published as memoirs were initially written as novels, and then the agent/editor said, This might work better as a memoir. 6. Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.
Magazines don't have enough confidence to have their own style, so they use a borrowed style. That is shocking to me, but your perception is very accurate. It's a way to be more commercially viable, but to me, that's not having a style, that's having a schtick.
If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.