I trust it will not be giving away professional secrets to say that many readers would be surprised perhaps shocked at the questions which some newspaper editors will put to a defenseless woman under the guise of flattery.

In spite of the haze of speculation it is still something of a shock to find myself here coming to terms with an enormous trust placed in my hands and with the inevitable sense of inadequacy that goes with that.

I am shocked at how much time I spend in the White House. I mean you know for people on the outside the idea of going to the White House for a meeting must seem like the most important serious even glamorous kind of thing to do.

The shock of any trauma I think changes your life. It's more acute in the beginning and after a little time you settle back to what you were. However it leaves an indelible mark on your psyche.

Trouble is kids feel they have to shock their elders and each generation grows up into something harder to shock.

Success comes to a writer as a rule so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has climbed.

I started my cooking 'career' aged 15 almost 20 years ago. At the time it was quite a shock suddenly working 75 to 80 hours a week without time to play football or other sports.

When onstage I always try to take my audience through as many emotions as I possibly can. I want them to go from laughter to tears be shocked and surprised and walk out the door with a renewed sense of themselves - and maybe a smile.

It was a shock to people of the nineteenth century when they discovered from observations science had made that many features of the biological world could be ascribed to the elegant principle of natural selection.

It is a shock to us in the twentieth century to discover from observations science has made that the fundamental mechanisms of life cannot be ascribed to natural selection and therefore were designed. But we must deal with our shock as best we can and go on.

Like many students I found the drudgery of real experiments and the slowness of progress a complete shock and at my low points I contemplated other alternative careers including study of the philosophy or sociology of science.

I can't say I'm happy to be talking about John Ritter and his passing. In my 21 years of Entertainment Tonight this really was one of the most shocking and sad things to have happened.

It's sad that we have become so accustomed to bad service that we're shocked when we get good service.

In the early days of Christianity the exercise of chastity was frequently combined with a close and romantic intimacy of affection between the sexes which shocked austere moralists.

The Christian use of religion as a personal love affair both shocked me and attracted me.

Any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child cannot be true.

Truth makes many appeals not the least of which is its power to shock.

But when I first got cancer after the initial shock and the fear and paranoia and crying and all that goes with cancer - that word means to most people ultimate death - I decided to see what I could do to take that negative and use it in a positive way.

As I've gotten older I've gotten more liberal and my father is increasingly conservative. It's so shocking to me because I always thought we had the same politics. The day I realized we voted for different presidents I practically fell out of my chair.

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.

We were so shocked by how fast that war went that President Bush did not have a plan a peace plan.

Agressive music can only shock you once. Afterwards its impact declines. It's inevitable.

I watch and listen to movies today and am shocked by the way actors deliver their lines. Everybody mumbles now and I don't understand why.

In the morning he was lying dead on one of the beds fully clothed. He was dead. I got the impression he wanted to go and I must have killed him. I can't remember strangling him. I just sat there shocked.