So that we will miss nothing. Partly it’s greed, but mainly its curiosity. We just want to experience it. And we do.
AGNES DE MILLEOurs is an upbeat, a hurried, hasty beat. It keeps pressing us to go farther, to include everything so that we can savor everything, so that we can know everything.
More Agnes de Mille Quotes
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Toe dancing is a dandy attention getter, second only to screaming.
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If you want to understand a nation, look at its dances and listen to its folk songs – don’t pay any attention to its politicians.
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They are just a lot of isolated individuals jiggling in a kind of self-hypnosis and dancing with others only to remind themselves that we are not completely alone in this world.
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No white man uses his feet the way an Indian does. He talks to the earth.
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We can’t stand silence, because silence includes thinking. And if we thought, we would have to face ourselves.
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Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little.
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But all of these knew very well what they did not want, and what they did not want was the current coin, the well-worn usage.
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What I could not learn was to think creatively on schedule.
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Find the passion. It takes great passion and great energy to do anything creative. I would go so far as to say you can’t do it without that passion.
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To make up a dance, I still need, as I needed then, a pot of tea, walking space, privacy and an idea.
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The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.
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What they wanted was something newly experienced, and therefore unknown and hard to attain.
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Tolstoi’s scripts are almost indecipherable.
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From this voyage no one returns poor or weary.
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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.
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Friends die one by one, but so, thank God, do enemies.
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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.
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great artists can be uncertain. Of course they are while strugggling to find solutions.
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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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I had had to learn the difference between the bearable fatigue and the unbearable, the fatigue of fear. The first can be cured by a night’s sleep; the second kills.
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The creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second rate.
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What have we got here in America that we believe we cannot live without?
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Who am I?, the artist asks. And he devotes his whole life to finding out.
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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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Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times.
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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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