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.
AGNES DE MILLEI 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.
More Agnes de Mille Quotes
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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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I want one word on my tombstone – dancer.
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From this voyage no one returns poor or weary.
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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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No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made.
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Who am I?, the artist asks. And he devotes his whole life to finding out.
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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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One of the good things about my having some recognition is that I can do something for the people
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No white man uses his feet the way an Indian does. He talks to the earth.
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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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I am completely absorbed by the music and the steps I choose to respond to the music.
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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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The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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What I could not learn was to think creatively on schedule.
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Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times.
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This is the precise difference between dancing and acrobatics. The dancer tries to express something; the acrobat merely pulls, raises, stretches and grinds.
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Toe dancing is a dandy attention getter, second only to screaming.
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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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What they wanted was something newly experienced, and therefore unknown and hard to attain.
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I think ought to have more and correct some of the matters fate fails to take care of.
AGNES DE MILLE