My heroines are part of me and my heroes are part of what I’d like to know.
AGNES DE MILLEThe creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second rate.
More Agnes de Mille Quotes
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There is something fearfully strengthening about cutting free even if the ties bandage the heart itself.
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I think ought to have more and correct some of the matters fate fails to take care of.
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The universe lies before you on the floor, in the air, in the mysterious bodies of your dancers, in your mind.
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Many other women have kicked higher, balanced longer, or turned faster. These are poor substitutes for passion.
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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.
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But remember that intent is everything. One does not just jump, one lifts into the air, one rises.
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The creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second rate.
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So that we will miss nothing. Partly it’s greed, but mainly its curiosity. We just want to experience it. And we do.
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Friends die one by one, but so, thank God, do enemies.
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We have the most varied and imaginative bathrooms in the world, we have kitchens with the most gimmicks, we have houses with every possible electrical gadget to save ourselves all kinds of trouble – all so that we can have leisure. Leisure, leisure, leisure!
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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.
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Tolstoi’s scripts are almost indecipherable.
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Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times.
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What have we got here in America that we believe we cannot live without?
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No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made.
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Theater people are always pining and agonizing because they’re afraid that they’ll be forgotten. And in America they’re quite right. They will be.
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Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times. The dancers don’t even look at one another.
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Dancers don’t get invited to visit people. It is assumed a boy dancer will run off with the spoons and a girl with the head of the house.
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We can’t stand silence, because silence induces thinking. And if we thought, we would have to face ourselves.
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Toe dancing is a dandy attention getter, second only to screaming.
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This is the precise difference between dancing and acrobatics. The dancer tries to express something; the acrobat merely pulls, raises, stretches and grinds.
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No white man uses his feet the way an Indian does. He talks to the earth.
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In the same way the lifted leg of an arabesque becomes a wing, and not a mechanical leverage like a raised trap door.
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Dance constitutes a true recapturing of… freedom and childish play.
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Dance in the body you have.
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The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.
AGNES DE MILLE