The 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.
AGNES DE MILLEOne of the good things about my having some recognition is that I can do something for the people
More Agnes de Mille Quotes
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Toe dancing is a dandy attention getter, second only to screaming.
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Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times.
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Tolstoi’s scripts are almost indecipherable.
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My heroines are part of me and my heroes are part of what I’d like to know.
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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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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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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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There is something fearfully strengthening about cutting free even if the ties bandage the heart itself.
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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 induces thinking. And if we thought, we would have to face ourselves.
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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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Who am I?, the artist asks. And he devotes his whole life to finding out.
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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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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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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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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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The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.
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Living is a form of not being sure, not know what next or how… The artists never entirely knows.
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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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What I could not learn was to think creatively on schedule.
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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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One of the good things about my having some recognition is that I can do something for the people
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Destiny is made known silently.
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I want one word on my tombstone – dancer.
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To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful. This is power, it is glory on earth and it is yours for the taking.
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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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