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.
AGNES DE MILLEMany other women have kicked higher, balanced longer, or turned faster. These are poor substitutes for passion.
More Agnes de Mille Quotes
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When I dance I am really meditating rather then performing for an audience.
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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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Dancers don’t get invited to visit people. It is assumed a boy dancer will run off with the spoons and a girl with the head of the house.
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Ballet technique never becomes easy, it becomes possible
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To make up a dance, I still need, as I needed then, a pot of tea, walking space, privacy and an idea.
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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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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.
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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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There is something fearfully strengthening about cutting free even if the ties bandage the heart itself.
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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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The acrobat is lost in a web of muscles the dancer is all but invisible in projected idea.
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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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I think ought to have more and correct some of the matters fate fails to take care of.
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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 truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. Bodies never lie.
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The creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second rate.
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Friends die one by one, but so, thank God, do enemies.
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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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great artists can be uncertain. Of course they are while strugggling to find solutions.
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Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times. The dancers don’t even look at one another.
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We can’t stand silence, because silence includes thinking. And if we thought, we would have to face ourselves.
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Dancing 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.
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I studied the way I danced- to the point of dropping.
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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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We can’t stand silence, because silence induces thinking. And if we thought, we would have to face ourselves.
AGNES DE MILLE