The creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second rate.
AGNES DE MILLEWe can’t stand silence, because silence includes thinking. And if we thought, we would have to face ourselves.
More Agnes de Mille Quotes
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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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In the same way the lifted leg of an arabesque becomes a wing, and not a mechanical leverage like a raised trap door.
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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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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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There is something fearfully strengthening about cutting free even if the ties bandage the heart itself.
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But remember that intent is everything. One does not just jump, one lifts into the air, one rises.
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Dance in the body you have.
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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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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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Dance constitutes a true recapturing of… freedom and childish play.
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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 know what next or how… The artists never entirely knows.
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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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Destiny is made known silently.
AGNES DE MILLE






