“What I could not learn was to think creatively on schedule.”

When I dance I am really meditating rather then performing for an audience.

So that we don’t go mad in the leisure, we have color TV. So that there will never, never, be a moment of silence, we have radio and Muzak.

Dance in the body you have.

Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times. The dancers don’t even look at one another.

Toe dancing is a dandy attention getter, second only to screaming.

From this voyage no one returns poor or weary.

We can’t stand silence, because silence induces thinking. And if we thought, we would have to face ourselves.

There is something fearfully strengthening about cutting free even if the ties bandage the heart itself.

Dancers aren’t made of their technique, but their passion.

This is the precise difference between dancing and acrobatics. The dancer tries to express something; the acrobat merely pulls, raises, stretches and grinds.

I think ought to have more and correct some of the matters fate fails to take care of.

The practice mirror is to be used for the correction of faults, not for a love affair, and the figure you watch should not become your dearest friend.

No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made.

Emily Dickinson provided four or more alternates for every word; Beethoven wrestled with endings to the point of exhaustion; in our day Jerome Robbins and his lack of decision are a byword in the dance profession.

Tolstoi’s scripts are almost indecipherable.

The choreographic process is exhausting. It happens on one’s feet after hours of work, and the energy required is roughly the equivalent of writing a novel and winning a tennis match simultaneously.

There’s one thing everyone should understand: I like my character.

Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.

I could easily have decided that life was cruel, that being black meant everything was stacked against me.

It was better to be in a jail where you could bang the walls than in a jail you could not see.

If we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too little and not too much, we would have found the safest way to health.

The looks, the stares, the giggles . . . I wanted to show everybody that I could do better and also that I could read.

I want – I want – I want – was all that she could think about – but just what this real want was she did not know.

If a man could but be turned about, he would see at once God and himself and the All.