With every passing year, BEC proves that it still has surprises left for us.

I was partly old-fashioned and partly modern.

My father was a professor of civil engineering at MIT, and my mother taught high school English.

After a semester or so, my infatuation with computers burnt out as quickly as it had begun.

It was there I met my future wife, Celeste Landry, although our lives took us separate ways for many years and we were not to marry until more than ten years later.

Travel provided many interesting experiences, but perhaps the most useful lesson I learned was that I really had no proficiency for learning the thousands of characters of the written Chinese language.

There are relatively few experiments in atomic physics these days that don't involve the use of a laser.

Six months after that, I left Taiwan, first for Hong Kong and then for mainland China, where I spent another three months studying still more Chinese and generally kicking around the country.

As it was, I realized choosing the study of Chinese literature as my life's work was probably a mistake.

I was born in Palo Alto, California in 1961.

Conversely, I came to realize that being good at something is hardly a reason to avoid doing it.

Just before my final year of high school, my brother, sister and I moved with my mother to San Francisco.

My freshman year of high school I joined the chess and math clubs.

My head was always bubbling over with facts and it seems to me this had little to do with my paying close attention in school and more to do with my voracious and omnivorous reading habits.

My fellow students there were very smart, but the really novel thing was that they actually seemed to put a lot of effort into their school work. By the end of my first semester there, I began to get into that habit as well.

With every passing year, BEC proves that it still has surprises left for us.

Between rounds of speed chess I read enough of a programming manual to teach myself to write programs on the school's DEC mainframe in the language Basic.

The postdoc explained to me how to distinguish different sorts of particles on the basis of the amounts of energy they deposited in various sorts of detectors, spark chambers, calorimeters, what have you.

The 1970s, the decade of my teenage years, was a transitional period in American youth culture.

I certainly remember building model rockets. It was fun to watch the rocket blast into the air, suspenseful to wonder if the parachute would open to bring the rocket safely back.

Most of my teachers probably found I made less trouble if they let me read.

My life is so full of surprises, nothing surprises me any more.

One of the greatest discoveries a man makes, one of his great surprises, is to find he can do what he was afraid he couldn't do.

What to do? We yanked the dress up over her lovely attributes and with the addition of a scarf, the problem was solved. Sorry, guys, blame that stuffy censor. He hated surprises.

I get a lot of recognition for my voice. That always surprises me.

Probably the biggest thing that surprises people is that I am obsessed with hockey. I grew up in the Boston area so I am obsessed with hockey since I was a little kid.

A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.

I've been blessed with some lovely scripts and a character that people could truly identify with. It's one of those surprises in life that makes you think, 'God was smiling on me that particular day.

What surprises me, what amazes me, is that it seems the military people were expecting to stumble on large quantities of gas, chemical weapons and biological weapons.

I've been around a long time, and life still has a whole lot of surprises for me.

I have taught students from the New York City area so long I have a special affinity and rapport with them. It surprises me sometimes that there are students from anywhere else.

Whatever precautions you take so the photograph will look like this or that, there comes a moment when the photograph surprises you. It is the other's gaze that wins out and decides.

I've found even after nearly 30 years of doing this, there are all kinds of new surprises that rear their heads at various times and I truly believe that 51% of the images, success takes place in the darkroom.

It is an endless procession of surprises. The expected rarely occurs and never in the expected manner.

But, I know enough people in that court, through the years, to know one thing: There's always somebody who surprises you, who rises above what they thought they appointed him for, and stays with the separation of powers, and with the right of the law to decide.

A story to me means a plot where there is some surprise. Because that is how life is - full of surprises.

One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it. With no regret, we agree to live in it with strangers, completely cut off from our habits and friends.

I'm in politics. I'm in government, so nothing surprises me.

They may turn out to be a great disappointment, or perhaps they may be full of enchanting surprises.

I'll tell you one thing, in what I do for a living, there's no substitute for experience. I don't care how much natural talent you may have... In the type of show I do, you can depend on surprises.

One mind can think only of its own questions; it rarely surprises itself.

It's most presumptuous to believe we already know all the answers and will never get any more big surprises.

When I do a horror or a fantasy film it all boils down to something in the script that surprises me. It could be a big thing or a small moment. If it's there I'll do it.

Passion surprises. One doesn't search it. It can happen to you tomorrow.

I love the sea's sounds and the way it reflects the sky. The colours that shimmer across its surface are unbelievable. This, combined with the colour of the water over white sand, surprises me every time.

Nature gives us all, including Prof. Lorentz, surprises. It was very quickly found that there are many exceptions to the rule of splitting of the lines only into triplets.

What surprises me is when people give me their mobile number. The other day, someone on a bus asked if I swear. I said I try not to, but of course I'm just a normal person.

My surprises come usually once I start rolling and photographing.

The books one has written in the past have two surprises in store: one couldn't write them again, and wouldn't want to.