I learned three important things in college-to use a library, to memorize quickly and visually, to drop asleep at any time given a horizontal surface and fifteen minutes.
AGNES DE MILLETheater 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.
More Agnes de Mille Quotes
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One of the good things about my having some recognition is that I can do something for the people
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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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Then I did the simplest thing in the world. I leaned down… and kissed him. And the world cracked open.
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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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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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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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Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times. The dancers don’t even look at one another.
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I studied the way I danced- to the point of dropping.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Tolstoi’s scripts are almost indecipherable.
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Friends die one by one, but so, thank God, do enemies.
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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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Dancing is such a despised and dishonored trade that if you tell a doctor or a laywer you do choreography he’ll look at you as if you were a hummingbird.
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What I could not learn was to think creatively on schedule.
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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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Destiny is made known silently.
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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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Dancers aren’t made of their technique, but their passion.
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Ours 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.
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