surprisingness

Yet apart from talking about the surprisingness or not of their community, celebrating the illustrative likenesses and un-likenesses of its members, its differences in relationship, there is little else we can say about this connection.

Post-Secular Conviviality 2008

In a narrative that alternates between the characters 'viewpoints — twelve-year-old Astrid, a kind of junior Lydia Davis, is a particularly wonderful voice — Smith maintains a playful, poetic idiom of startling and clarifying emotional power, so that the prose, in its logical beauty and its surprisingness, serves as an analogue of the enchantment dispensed by Amber.

New fiction Joseph O'Neil 2006

In a narrative that alternates between the characters 'viewpoints — twelve-year-old Astrid, a kind of junior Lydia Davis, is a particularly wonderful voice — Smith maintains a playful, poetic idiom of startling and clarifying emotional power, so that the prose, in its logical beauty and its surprisingness, serves as an analogue of the enchantment dispensed by Amber.

New fiction Joseph O'Neil 2006

She had added that touch to soften the crude surprisingness of her announcement.

The Return of the Soldier 1918

Familiarity had robbed the fact of some of its surprisingness, but there remained a substratum of wonder, not removed even by the sight of his betrothed's photograph and the information that she was a distant relative who had been brought up with him from infancy.

Frivolous Cupid Anthony Hope 1898

The public may not be so good a judge either of the building or of the drawing: but, knowing nothing of the technical difficulties, it at least forms its judgment on the true criterion which is, of course, the value of the product, not the surprisingness of its having been produced or the difficulties overcome in its production.

Milton John Cann Bailey 1897

Familiarity had robbed the fact of some of its surprisingness, but there remained a substratum of wonder, not removed even by the sight of his betrothed's photograph and the information that she was a distant relative who had been brought up with him from infancy.

Frivolous Cupid 1895

For there is a great accent of pleasure and delightfulness certainly added to them by the surprisingness of them, when they come most unexpectedly.

The Whole Works of the Rev. John Howe, M.A. with a Memoir of the Author. Vol. VI. 1630-1705 1822

They vied with each other in the gorgeousness, the pedantry and the surprisingness of their devices; but the palm was surely due to him of the number who had the glory of contriving a battle between certain allegorical personages, in the midst of which, "legs and arms of men, well and lively wrought, were to be let fall in numbers on the ground as bloody as might be."

Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth Lucy Aikin 1822

My second collection, Angel, came out of the surprisingness of that process.

Culture | guardian.co.uk 2009