To make up a dance, I still need, as I needed then, a pot of tea, walking space, privacy and an idea.
AGNES DE MILLEMany other women have kicked higher, balanced longer, or turned faster. These are poor substitutes for passion.
More Agnes de Mille Quotes
-
-
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.
AGNES DE MILLE -
Dance in the body you have.
AGNES DE MILLE -
But remember that intent is everything. One does not just jump, one lifts into the air, one rises.
AGNES DE MILLE -
Dance constitutes a true recapturing of… freedom and childish play.
AGNES DE MILLE -
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.
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 think ought to have more and correct some of the matters fate fails to take care of.
AGNES DE MILLE -
Who am I?, the artist asks. And he devotes his whole life to finding out.
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 -
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.
AGNES DE MILLE -
No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made.
AGNES DE MILLE -
What they wanted was something newly experienced, and therefore unknown and hard to attain.
AGNES DE MILLE -
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 MILLE -
I studied the way I danced- to the point of dropping.
AGNES DE MILLE -
The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. Bodies never lie.
AGNES DE MILLE






