There's only one thing harder than living in a home with an adolescent - and that's being an adolescent. The moodiness the volatility the wholesale lack of impulse control all would be close to clinical conditions if they occurred at another point in life. In adolescence they're just part of the behavioral portfolio.

It's never occurred to me to worry about my health or that I'll get old or that people will stop laughing at me.

There is no word for feeling nostalgic about the future but that's what a parent's tears often are a nostalgia for something that has not yet occurred. They are the pain of hope the helplessness of hope and finally the surrender to hope.

The agony of my feelings allowed me no respite no incident occurred from which my rage and misery could not extract its food.

I wrote because I needed to and wanted to. It never occurred to me that I'd become famous.

It never occurred to me that I wouldn't go to college and have a career - as well as a family - of my own. Both my parents but especially my mother encouraged me and led me to believe that it was possible.

Some of the most important conversations I've ever had occurred at my family's dinner table.

Workers have kept faith in American institutions. Most of the conflicts which have occurred have been when labor's right to live has been challenged and denied.

As far as I was concerned the Depression was an ill wind that blew some good. If it hadn't occurred my parents would have given me my college education. As it was I had to scrabble for it.

Gradually it occurred to me that we spend a great deal of life asleep and that dreams are little narratives little stories. I thought 'Who's choreographing this stuff?'

It never occurred to me that I'd be on a television show or in feature films but when those came into play my dreams changed along the way.

My dad and mom divorced when I was around ten and I didn't live with him after that though he was close by and we saw each other weekly. I wasn't really aware that he was a writer I didn't start reading his writing until I was about fifteen. It occurred to me then that my dad was kind of special he's still one of my favorite writers.

For this equilibrium now in sight let us trust that mankind as it has occurred in the greatest periods of its past will find for itself a new code of ethics common to all made of tolerance of courage and of faith in the Spirit of men.

Rarely in modern times has there been such a revolution in commercial sentiment as occurred in 2008 or such a display in government and business of panic and helplessness.

The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible at least on the scale it occurred.

Life expectancy in many parts of Africa can be something around the age of thirty five to thirty eight. I mean you're very fortunate if you live to that age. In fact when I went to Uganda for the first time one of the things that occurred to me was that I saw very few elderly people.

Anyone who writes an autobiographical work at the age of 34 is at best presumptuous. It occurred to me that it was time to set the record straight.