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"Most people come out of their Ph.D. experience trying to prove themselves, trying to get ahead, trying to get published. You're scared everybody else is going to do your research and get your topic."
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Exlpore more Experience quotes

"Poetry is innocent, not wise. It does not learn from experience, because each poetic experience is unique."

"I just came into my own sexuality at thirty. I don't think it's something you can deeply experience at 18 or any time before that."

"It was like making a blunder at a party; there was nothing to do about it, it was dreadfully mortifying, but it showed a lack of sense to ascribe too much importance to it."

"Through this experience we have been warned - learn everything, don't forget anything!"

"Failure is only an experience. Experience is the foundation of any success."

"War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it."

"The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of the pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes."

"I will perform My Heart Will Go On for the rest of my life and it will always remain a very emotional experience for me."

"We are all the sum of a million moments in our lives."

"Common experience is the gold reserve which confers an exchange value on the currency which words are; without this reserve of shared experiences, all our pronouncements are checks drawn on insufficient funds."
Explore more quotes by Bernice Johnson Reagon


"So one of the things that happened with integration in the South is they found that the black teachers were much more educated than the white teachers."


"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."


"If I had been at a University I don't think I would have been able to have the experience I had in my Smithsonian work. I don't think I have been as successful."


"But I'm a historian. I wasn't interested in just being a producer, I was interested in doing research and presenting that research to a general public."


"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 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."


"The first job I had with the Smithsonian was as a field researcher among African American communities in Southwest Louisiana and Arkansas for the festival."


"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."


"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."


"At the same time all this was happening, there was a folk song revival movement goingon, so the commercial music industry was actually changed by the Civil Rights Movement."
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