Word: astonishing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...outs and politically incorrect (understatement) proclamations while tweaking various bastions of civilized behavior. Although the letters read like spontaneous creations, lacking the craft and precision of Southern's best work, their surprisingly crude contents do satisfy his cardinal rule for successful writing: namely, that it possesses the "capacity to astonish...
...Presley era and beyond, stars made an impact by going too far, by affronting community propriety (when the community still had propriety), by translating the lewd and the crude into popular art. Bing was just the reverse. He didn't outrage or astonish; he reassured. He was not on the edge; he created a new middle, which always should have existed but didn't until he eased into it. Imagine that, far into the history of food - say, around 1930 - someone had come up with the potato. That was the eureka element to Crosby's relaxed style. He was Everyman...
...Sydneysiders take for granted an intimacy with nature that would astonish most city residents worldwide. Inner-city suburbs echo to the screech of sulfur-crested cockatoos and the laughter of sturdy kookaburras; brilliant rainbow lorikeets hang upside down in fruit trees squabbling over berries. As night falls, mighty Port Jackson fig trees discharge clouds of flying foxes, while possums patrol urban gardens and clatter across the rooftops. Everywhere, in parks, gardens, at the water's edge, the luxuriant subtropical vegetation-mosses and ferns, cabbage palms, ash and she-oak, ancient angophora forests and a hundred species of gum tree-reminds...
Gore quoted another Connecticut native, Mark Twain, when explaining why he chose Lieberman, saying, "Do the right thing: It will gratify your friends and astonish your enemies...
Fact: Johannes Vermeer (1632-75) was a Dutch painter with a sketchy biography and exacting pictures that continue to astonish more than three centuries after his death. Fiction: an illiterate girl named Greit, 17, a servant in the Vermeer household, was the model for the artist's celebrated portrait Girl with a Pearl Earring...