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.
AGNES DE MILLEDancing 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.
More Agnes de Mille Quotes
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Who am I?, the artist asks. And he devotes his whole life to finding out.
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I am completely absorbed by the music and the steps I choose to respond to the music.
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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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Ballet technique never becomes easy, it becomes possible
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Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times.
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The universe lies before you on the floor, in the air, in the mysterious bodies of your dancers, in your mind.
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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.
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Dancers aren’t made of their technique, but their passion.
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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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No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made.
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When I dance I am really meditating rather then performing for an audience.
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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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Then I did the simplest thing in the world. I leaned down… and kissed him. And the world cracked open.
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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 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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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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Toe dancing is a dandy attention getter, second only to screaming.
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The creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second rate.
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What I could not learn was to think creatively on schedule.
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No white man uses his feet the way an Indian does. He talks to the earth.
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But all of these knew very well what they did not want, and what they did not want was the current coin, the well-worn usage.
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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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There is something fearfully strengthening about cutting free even if the ties bandage the heart itself.
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Friends die one by one, but so, thank God, do enemies.
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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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Living is a form of not being sure, not know what next or how… The artists never entirely knows.
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