We can’t stand silence, because silence induces thinking. And if we thought, we would have to face ourselves.
AGNES DE MILLEThe 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.
More Agnes de Mille Quotes
-
-
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.
AGNES DE MILLE -
I want one word on my tombstone – dancer.
AGNES DE MILLE -
Destiny is made known silently.
AGNES DE MILLE -
We can’t stand silence, because silence includes thinking. And if we thought, we would have to face ourselves.
AGNES DE MILLE -
The universe lies before you on the floor, in the air, in the mysterious bodies of your dancers, in your mind.
AGNES DE MILLE -
Dance in the body you have.
AGNES DE MILLE -
What have we got here in America that we believe we cannot live without?
AGNES DE MILLE -
Living is a form of not being sure, not know what next or how… The artists never entirely knows.
AGNES DE MILLE -
The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. Bodies never lie.
AGNES DE MILLE -
I am completely absorbed by the music and the steps I choose to respond to the music.
AGNES DE MILLE -
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.
AGNES DE MILLE -
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.
AGNES DE MILLE -
In the same way the lifted leg of an arabesque becomes a wing, and not a mechanical leverage like a raised trap door.
AGNES DE MILLE -
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.
AGNES DE MILLE -
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 MILLE