“It never occurred to me to say no.”

“Protest is when I say this does not please me. Resistance is when I ensure what does not please me occurs no more.”

“I always feel sad for the girl that I was, because it never occurred to me that my mother might comfort me. She has never told me she loved me, and I never assumed she did. She tended to me. She administrated me.”

“I never drink while I'm working, but after a few glasses I get ideas that would never have occurred to me dead sober.”

“It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed.”

“My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.”

“What nobility of feeling! To sacrifice your own pleasure to preserve the comfort of others! It is a thing, I confess, that would never occur to me.”

“It would be inaccurate to say that John Fowles is a middlebrow writer who sometimes hopes he is a highbrow: it has never occurred to him to believe otherwise. There is a difference, morally.”

“I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.”

“Society says with the authority of its police power how intercourse will and will not occur. Any act so controlled by the state, proscribed and prescribed in detail, cannot be private in the ordinary sense. Privacy is essentially a sphere of freedom immune from regulation by the state. In that sense, intercourse has never occurred in private.”