A Private Experience Quotes

I was determined to get them away from the idea that their education is a private experience. ~ Joan Countryman

Like how the government of General Abacha was using its foreign policy to legitimize itself in the eyes of other African countries. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

She cries quietly, her shoulders heaving up and down, not the kind of loud sobbing that the women Chika knows do, the kind that screams Hold me and comfort me because I cannot deal with this alone. The woman's crying is private, as though she is carrying out a necessary ritual that involves no one else. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The witness is frequent and insistent that God is inherently relational and personal. So God cannot be either received or understood apart from our being personal and realtional as well. That most emphatically excludes the detached intellect as a way of knowing God. It excludes programmatic work as a way of knowing God. It excludes cultivation of the ecstatic and visionary as a way of knowing God. God is not an abstract idea that can be mastered, not an impersonal force that can be used, not a private experience that can be indulged." Eugene Peterson, "Living the Resurrection" (106). ~ Eugene H. Peterson

She will listen to BBC radio and hear the accounts of the deaths and the riots - "religious with undertones of ethnic tension" the voice will say. And she will fling the radio to the wall and a fierce red rage will run through her at how it has all been packaged and sanitized and made to fit into so few words, all those bodies. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

This pervasive craving to be recognized as special amounted to an abdication of power, an outsourcing of your core responsibilities. I spurned the fawning of strangers, but I did feel special to myself. I had found that "feeling special" was a private experience, and no one else's projected fascination could substitute for quiet absorption in your own life. ~ Lionel Shriver

Reading a novel of a private experience, very, very different, the nature of it is very different. ~ Sydney Pollack

Jack! Pray tell Miss MacFarlane that the roads are impassable."
"The roads are impassable," he replied immediately.
"And that she should stay at least another day."
"You should stay at least another day," he repeated, a twinkle in his eyes.
Fiona nodded. "And that she is more then welcome here."
"I am certain she knows that."
"And how we'd love to have her for another week, at least,and-"
Jack laughed and took his wife's hand. "Fiona, my love, I believe Miss MacFarlane is very aware that we both wish her to stay."
Sophia had to smile. "I am very flattered, but we really must go. There've been so many unexpected storms that the roads could easily get worse."
Jack snorted a laugh while Fiona glanced up the stairs. "Haven't there been," she said grimly before returning to gaze at Sophia. "I am so disappointed you are leaving."
There was genuine warmth in Fiona's voice. "I am, too,but I must get back to my father, who has been ill. I was only to be gone one day, and he'll worry if I don't return immediately."
"I suppose you can't-"
"She's not going anywhere."
Sophia closed her eyes at the deep voice from the top of the stairs. Her enitre body had tightened at the sound, traitor that it was.
Dougal came down the stairs to stand before Sophia, his expressioin guarded and tense. "Fiona,Jack, would you mind giving me a few moments' private speech with Miss MacFarlane?"
"Will you attempt to persuade her to stay ~ Karen Hawkins

It didn't matter where, really. What mattered was the connection, the space formed between the two of the, a slice cut from the universe and made private and inviolable. ~ Scott Westerfeld

It's relatively easy to act nice and normal in front of a crowd, or in public. The tricky part is doing it in private. ~ Robert Black

She was her death now, that death which she had so much striven to emulate in life, which she had studied and practised and loved. She had succeeded, and death and she had converged into a single point. Who knew if that was victory or defeat? His last vision was of the white veil that hid her now. After all, and at last, she had become utterly private. ~ Iris Murdoch

What happened was private. I was in it with Rose. She had hurt me grievously and now I was forever attached. I was in it now with all the women in the world. I walked home glad. I will die, I thought with a bounce in my step. I'm whole. Not whole like anyone else, but whole like me. Painful, but simple. It was very simple now. ~ Eileen Myles

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I was a private person, and I valued my alone time. It was why I chose to have no roommates and no drama. ~ Kendall Ryan

In 1992, Bill Clinton ran on a platform of 'ending welfare as we know it.' His political worldview, drawn from like-minded thinkers at the Democratic Leadership Council, was based in private sector growth and personal responsibility. ~ Nina Easton

The double doors separating the private dining room from the rest of Bernard's swung open. A tall broad-shouldered body filled the doorway. Hugh d'Ambray strode into the room. ~ Ilona Andrews

This was hopeless. In a novel, Adrian wouldn't just have accepted things as they were put to him. What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn't behave as he would have done in a book? Adrian should have gone snooping, or saved up his pocket money and employed a private detective; perhaps all four of us should have gone off on a Quest to Discover the Truth. Or would that have been less like literature and too much like a kids' story? ~ Julian Barnes

If private men are obliged to perform the offices of government, to protect the weak and dispense justice, then the government becomes only a hired man, or clerk, to perform menial or indifferent services. ~ Henry David Thoreau

The gap between rich and poor is widening dramatically. There's a hangar at the Cairo airport for private jets, billionaires are on the Forbes list, and Egypt's annual per-capita income is two thousand dollars. How can you sustain that? ~ Mohamed ElBaradei

We are living in a time when the very integrity of the Constitution is being threatened daily, from federal bailouts to federal assumption of control over private business. ~ David Limbaugh

She extends a fingertip. After a moment's hesitation, Manfred extends a fingertip of his own. They touch, exchanging vCards and instant-messaging handles. She stands and stalks from the breakfast room, and Manfred's breath catches at a flash of ankle through the slit in her skirt, which is long enough to comply with workplace sexual harassment codes back home. Her presence conjures up memories of her tethered passion, the red afterglow of a sound thrashing. She's trying to drag him into her orbit again, he thinks dizzily. She knows she can have this effect on him any time she wants: She's got the private keys to his hypothalamus, and sod the metacortex. Three billion years of reproductive determinism have given her twenty-first-century ideology teeth: If she's finally decided to conscript his gametes into the war against impending population crash, he'll find it hard to fight back. The only question: Is it business or pleasure? And does it make any difference, anyway? ~ Charles Stross

It's a real wrenching thing to go from being a private person to being a public person, especially when you're being autobiographical. ~ James Taylor

And the process of reading is such a private one. I once came into a room where a friend of mine was reading one of my books, and he clicked his tongue impatiently and shooed me off. ~ Vikram Seth

Improvisation and new learning are not private processes; they are shared with others at every age. We are called to join in a dance whose steps must be learned along the way, so it is important to attend and respond. Even in uncertainty, we are responsible for our steps. ~ Mary Catherine Bateson

He was sitting in front of the kitchen fire, and after Elizabeth's taunt he cocked up a hind leg and carefully, ostentatiously, groomed his private parts, a habit which he often used with great effect to annoy his women folk. ~ Olaf Stapledon

Tonight - by taking this solemn oath - I am no longer a private citizen but the Mayor of the City of Chicago. ~ Jane Byrne

[Roger] Vadim became famous worldwide as a director, and I as an actress, but the other side of the coin was terrible. My life was totally turned upside down. I was followed, spied upon, adored, insulted. My private life became public. ~ Brigitte Bardot

In a relentlessly commercial culture, the communication of our private meanings has been vaguely corrupted around the edges by the toxic idioms of merchandising. ~ Charles Baxter

Since Social Security faces a large gap between what it promises younger workers and what it can afford to pay them, private savings will likely need to play a larger role in retirement planning for younger workers. ~ Ron Lewis

The talents of an artist, small or great, are God-given. They've nothing to do with the private person; they're nothing to be proud of. They're just a sacred trust ... Having been given, I must give. Man shall not live by bread alone, and what the farmer does I must do. I must feed the people - with my songs. ~ Paul Robeson

There is a big difference between what I do onstage and what I do in my private life. I don't put my living room on magazine pages. ~ Annie Lennox

Any chance I could interest you in a private star party? ~ Mysti Jaye

My high school was a private school where you went to an Ivy League. That's just what was expected of you and nothing less. So I grew up never being okay with a 'B' because a 'B' was not good enough. ~ Troian Bellisario

Sebastian encountered Cam in the hallway outside the reading room. "Where is he?" he demanded without preamble.
Stopping before him with an expressionless face, Cam said shortly, "He's gone."
"Why didn't you follow him?" White-hot fury blazed in Sebastian's eyes. This news, added to the frustration of his vow of celibacy, was the last straw.
Cam, who had been exposed to years of Ivo Jenner's volcanic temper, remained unruffled. "It was unnecessary in my judgment," he said. "He won't return."
"I don't pay you to act on your own damned judgment. I pay you to act on mine! You should have dragged him here by the throat and then let me decide what was to be done with the bastard."
Cam remained silent, sliding a quick, subtle glance at Evie, who was inwardly relieved by the turn of events. They were both aware that had Cam brought Bullard back to the club, there was a distinct possibility that Sebastian might actually have killed him - and the last thing Evie wanted was a murder charge on her husband's head.
"I want him found," Sebastian said vehemently, pacing back and forth across the reading room. "I want at least two men hired to look for him day and night until he is brought to me. I swear he'll serve as an example to anyone who even thinks of lifting a finger against my wife." He raised his arm and pointed to the doorway. "Bring me a list of names within the hour. The best detectives available - private ones. I don't want some idiot from ~ Lisa Kleypas

Our plutocracy, whether the hedge fund managers in Greenwich, Connecticut, or the Internet moguls in Palo Alto, now lives like the British did in colonial India: ruling the place but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; to the person fortunate enough to own a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension, and viable public transportation doesn't even compute. With private doctors on call and a chartered plane to get to the Mayo Clinic, why worry about Medicare? ~ Mike Lofgren

There is a divergence between private and social accounting that the market fails to register. One essential task of law and government is to institute the necessary conditions. ~ John Rawls

I hate solitude, but I'm afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company which I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls. It's already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself. ~ Iris Murdoch

Each way to suicide is its own: intensely private, unknowable, and terrible. Suicide will have seemed to its perpetrator the last and best of bad possibilities, and any attempt by the living to chart this final terrain of life can be only a sketch, maddeningly incomplete ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Our constitution is called a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people. When it is a question of settling private disputes, everyone is equal before the law; when it is a question of putting one person before another in positions of public responsibility, what counts is not membership of a particular class, but the actual ability which the man possesses. ~ Thucydides

What happened? Stan repeats.
To us?
To the country?
What happened when childhood ends in Dealey Plaza, in Memphis, in the kitchen of the Ambassador, your belief your hope your trust lying in a pool of blood again? Fifty-five thousand of your brothers dead in Vietnam, a million Vietnamese, photos of naked napalmed children running down a dirt road, Kent State, Soviet tanks roll into Prague so you turn on drop out you know you can't reinvent the country but maybe you reimagine yourself you believe you really believe that you can that you can create a world of your own and then you lower that expectation to just a piece of ground to make a stand on but then you learn that piece of ground costs money that you don't have.
What happened?
Altamont, Charlie Manson, Sharon Tate, Son of Sam, Mark Chapman we saw a dream turn into a nightmare we saw love and peace turn into endless war and violence our idealism into realism our realism into cynicism our cynicism into apathy our apathy into selfishness our selfishness into greed and then greed was good and we
Had babies, Ben, we had you and we had hopes but we also had fears we created nests that became bunkers we made our houses baby-safe and we bought car seats and organic apple juice and hired multilingual nannies and paid tuition to private schools out of love but also out of fear.
What happened?
You start by trying to create a new world and then you find yourself just wanting to add a b ~ Don Winslow

Fletcher Von Pein was one of the twelve founders of the Omega Agency. He was also a powerful banker and a majority shareholder in the US Federal Reserve which, despite its misleading name, had zero government ownership and was actually a private corporation owned by the global elite. ~ James Morcan

The security business is as thick as the club. Business in both areas stays private. Everyone is on a need-to-know basis, me and Mom included...that is until I patch in. ~ Katie McGarry

I am reminded that no matter how hard you try, you can never be more than twelve years old with your parents. Parents earnestly try not to inflame, but their comments contain no scale and a strange focus. Discussing your private life with parents is like misguidedly looking at a zit in a car's rearview mirror and being convinced, in the absence of contrast or context, that you have developed combined heat rash and skin cancer. ~ Douglas Coupland

In order for our country and economy to get on the right track again, we need a leader who understands how the real economy works and has the vision to fundamentally change Washington. That leader is Mitt Romney. No other candidate in the field possesses his lifetime of success in both the private sector and as a governor. ~ Timothy Griffin

Besides, there are always pet names to tide one over: a practice of Bengali nomenclature grants, to every single person, two names. In Bengali, the word for pet name is daknam, meaning, literally, the name by which one is called, by friends, family and other intimates, at home and in other private unguarded moments. Pet names are a persistent remnant of childhood; a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated. They are a reminder; too, that one is a not thing to all people. These are the names by which they are known in their respective families, the names by which they are adored and scolded and missed and loved.

Every pet name is paired with a good name, a bhalonam, for identification in the outside world. Consequently, good names appear on envelopes, on diplomas, in telephone directories, and in all other public places. Good names tend to represent dignified and enlightened qualities. Pet names have no such aspirations. Pet names are never recorded officially, only uttered, and remembered. Unlike good names, pet names are frequently meaningless, deliberately silly, ironic, and even onomatopoetic. Often in one's infancy, one answers unwittingly to dozens of pet names, until one eventually sticks. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

And, indeed, what is the State anyway but organized banditry? What is taxation but theft on a gigantic, unchecked, scale? What is war but mass murder on a scale impossible by private police forces? What is conscription but mass enslavement? Can anyone envision a private police force getting away with a tiny fraction of what States get away with, and do habitually, year after year, century after century? ~ Murray N. Rothbard

Memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one's private past, but an immersion in the past of others, which is to say: history - which one both participates in and is a witness to, is a part of and apart from. Everything, therefore, is present in his mind at once, as if each element were reflecting the light of all the others, and at the same time emitting its own unique and unquenchable radiance. ~ Paul Auster

People are complicated creatures, with a nuanced set of private and public incentives, and that our behavior is enormously influenced by circumstances. ~ Steven D. Levitt

Research promoted by NARA within a major coalition of Federal and private sector research partners has at last demonstrated that an Electronic Records Archives can be built. ~ Allen Weinstein

A prince must not have any objective nor any thought, nor take up any art, other than the art of war and its ordering and discipline; because it is the only art that pertains to him who commands. And it is of such virtue that not only does it maintain those who were born princes, but many times makes men rise to that rank from private station. ~ Niccolo Machiavelli

The fact that you have government-guaranteed student loans has created a whole new sector in the American economy that didn't really exist before - private for-profit universities that sell junk degrees that don't help the students. They promise the students, "We'll help you get a better job. We'll arrange a loan so that you don't have to pay a penny for this education." Their pet bank gets them the government-guaranteed loan, and the student may get the junk degree, but doesn't get a job, so they don't pay the loan. ~ Michael Hudson

For the first time in his life, Midhat wished he were more religious. Of course he prayed, but though that was a private mechanism it sometimes felt like a public act, and the lessons of the Quran were lessons by rote, one was steeped in them, hearing them so often. They were the texture of his world, and yet they did not occupy that central, vital part of his mind, the part that was vibrating at this moment, on this train, rattling forward while he struggled to hold all these pieces. As a child he had felt some of the same curiosity he held for the mysteries of other creeds - for Christianity with its holy fire, the Samaritans with their alphabets - but that feeling had dulled while he was still young, when traditional religion began to seem a worldly thing, a realm of morals and laws and the same old stories and holidays. They were acts, not thoughts. He faced the water now along the coast, steadying his gaze on the slow distance, beyond the blur of trees pushing past the tracks, on the desolate fishing boats hobbling over the waves. He sensed himself tracing the lip of something very large, something black and well-like, a vessel which was at the same time an emptiness, and he thought, without thinking precisely, only feeling with the tender edges of his mind, what the Revelation might have been for in its origin. Why it was so important that they could argue to the sword what it meant if God had hands, and whether He had made the universe. Underneath it all was a living u ~ Isabella Hammad

I can hear the library humming in the night,
a choir of authors murmuring inside their books
along the unlit, alphabetical shelves,
Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son,
each one stitched into his own private coat,
together forming a low, gigantic chord of language. ~ Billy Collins

Private enterprise in the history of civilization has never led large, expensive, dangerous projects with unknown risks. That has never happened because when you combine all these factors, you cannot create a capital market valuation of that activity. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson