The creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second rate.
AGNES DE MILLEIn the same way the lifted leg of an arabesque becomes a wing, and not a mechanical leverage like a raised trap door.
More Agnes de Mille Quotes
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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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Then I did the simplest thing in the world. I leaned down… and kissed him. And the world cracked open.
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No white man uses his feet the way an Indian does. He talks to the earth.
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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.
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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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I want one word on my tombstone – dancer.
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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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Ballet technique never becomes easy, it becomes possible
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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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What they wanted was something newly experienced, and therefore unknown and hard to attain.
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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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No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made.
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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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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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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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