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.
AGNES DE MILLEModern dancers give a sinister portent about our times.
More Agnes de Mille Quotes
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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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Destiny is made known silently.
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I studied the way I danced- to the point of dropping.
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Ballet technique never becomes easy, it becomes possible
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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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Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times.
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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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Friends die one by one, but so, thank God, do enemies.
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Then I did the simplest thing in the world. I leaned down… and kissed him. And the world cracked open.
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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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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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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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Tolstoi’s scripts are almost indecipherable.
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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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The acrobat is lost in a web of muscles the dancer is all but invisible in projected idea.
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What I could not learn was to think creatively on schedule.
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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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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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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 includes thinking. And if we thought, we would have to face ourselves.
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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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Many other women have kicked higher, balanced longer, or turned faster. These are poor substitutes for passion.
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No white man uses his feet the way an Indian does. He talks to the earth.
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Dancers aren’t made of their technique, but their passion.
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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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This is the precise difference between dancing and acrobatics. The dancer tries to express something; the acrobat merely pulls, raises, stretches and grinds.
AGNES DE MILLE