“So that we will miss nothing. Partly it’s greed, but mainly its curiosity. We just want to experience it. And we do.”

Dancers aren’t made of their technique, but their passion.

This is the precise difference between dancing and acrobatics. The dancer tries to express something; the acrobat merely pulls, raises, stretches and grinds.

I think ought to have more and correct some of the matters fate fails to take care of.

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.

No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made.

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.

Tolstoi’s scripts are almost indecipherable.

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.

The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. Bodies never lie.

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.

Destiny is made known silently.

What have we got here in America that we believe we cannot live without?

I studied the way I danced- to the point of dropping.

My heroines are part of me and my heroes are part of what I’d like to know.

In the same way the lifted leg of an arabesque becomes a wing, and not a mechanical leverage like a raised trap door.

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.