By the time a second term rolls around, the illusions about a president have largely evaporated.
The thing is, I've been writing for a long time now, trying to be a poet for the last 40 years, and it's still very difficult not to second-guess myself when reading my own work.
I hope for so much from every book I read. And time and again, I find myself disappointed. I look across my bookshelves and see hundreds of titles which in my memory seem merely mediocre or second-rate. Only occasionally does a novel appear for which I feel a lasting passion, a book that I think could in time become a classic.
Secondary school was a lot harder. That was probably my hardest time. Some of the girls were really nasty. I had to move schools because of the bullying there.
I don't think I met an actual Mormon until college, and by that time, I was wary of them. I knew about the church through school and, secondhand, through non-Mormon friends.
I wanted to be a secret agent and an astronaut, preferably at the same time.
I've always been interested in the office. I was a secretary a long time ago, and I've always been into paperwork. My first secretarial job was 1965 or 1966.
I reached a time in college when I didn't know what I wanted to do. At that time, women's careers were essentially nursing, secretarial and teaching. My mother advised me to get my teacher's certificate.
The '50s were a secretive time.
When Nawaz Sharif was Prime Minister in 1997, we were combating a different kind of terrorism at that time. It was what you call sectarian terrorism, and 9/11 had not happened. And we were tackling that with success and dedication.
At this moment, when Ireland seems about to break into something new, we thought it was worth looking back at a time when people seemed to have found a way out of the sectarian division of the country.
But in practice Australia - the pluralism of Australia - sorry the sectarianism to an extent stopped at the time you took your uniform off after coming home from school.
It's a social life, or time to read the comment section: I prefer social life.
Travel gives me the opportunity to walk through the sectors of cities where one can clearly see the passage of time.
I have said time and again that the republican order, and secularism, when executed perfectly, are blessings from God.
The time has come - and must come - for multilateral conversations about a secure peace in all of Europe.
I keep my stuff updated all the time. Being in the security industry, I keep up to date with securities.
Eighty-five percent cannot read when they enter the security forces of Afghanistan. Why? Because the Taliban withheld education during the period of time in which these men and women would have learned to read.
We're probably going to see some post-2014 military presence - some U.S. presence and a NATO presence - and while we've got much work to do in the next 29 months, we'll have additional time later for the continued professionalization of the Afghan security forces.
Like our physical bodies, our memory becomes out of shape. As children, we are constantly learning new experiences, but by the time we reach our 20s, we start to lead a more sedentary life both mentally and physically. Our lives become routine, and we stop challenging our brains, and our memory starts to suffer.
