top of page

"I started graduate school in 1971, I started working at the Smithsonian in the festival in 1972. I went full-time at the Smithsonian in 1974. And I got my doctorate in 1975."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more School quotes

"School...school... is just nothing... if you think that you are going to learn something. You are here wrong, you wanna see the system?It's in about23 Channels as a start then increases... decreases... even with different topics in the end... they want you to recall the whole data from the 23 Channels as for Perfect, as For under Perfect Okay..okay... but still not perfect, as for Good... Just an Okay... and as for Middle... Little from there and little from there as for the last... Nothing at all."

"The most important thing I learned in school was how to touch type."

"When I was in high school, I read all of Neil Simon's plays."

"He nodded toward the sub. "This is going to be a blow-off day."I dragged my mind away from magical intrigue. After being homeschooled for most of my life, some parts of the "normal" school world was a mystery. "What does that mean, exactly.""Usually teacher leave subs a lesson plan, telling them what to do. I saw Ms. Terwilliger left. It said, 'Distract them."

"You should have seen me in my Catholic school girl skirt with my knees knocking together."

"Racial and denominational schools impart to the membership of their communities something which the general educational institution is wholly unable to inculcate."

"I was always in plays at school and in school concerts - you could say I liked to show off."
Explore more quotes by Bernice Johnson Reagon


"Personally I discovered that you could go through the academy as a young scholar, come out, and almost immediately have an impact on the academic environment."


"The voice I have now, I got the first time I sang in a movement meeting, after I got out of jail... and I'd never heard it before in my life."


"The Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife, actually, was an effort to put something on the mall in Washington so American tourists could walk through America, and in their minds everything on the mall would be American."


"I came out of the Civil Rights Movement, and I had a different kind of focus than most people who have just the academic background as their primary training experience."


"I learned that if you bring black people together, you bring them together with a song. To this day, I don't understand how people think they can bring anybody together without a song."


"I was at the Smithsonian for twenty years, and I'm still at the Smithsonian as a curator emeritus, and I still plan to figure out what that means for me at this point in my life."


"Life's challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they're supposed to help you discover who you are."


"In fact when Sweet Honey was ten years old it was too big for me to run, and I knew it, but I ran it for another thirteen years because I couldn't convince other people to really do it. And this year, I'm not running it."
bottom of page