But remember that intent is everything. One does not just jump, one lifts into the air, one rises.
AGNES DE MILLELiving is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little.
More Agnes de Mille Quotes
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I studied the way I danced- to the point of dropping.
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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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Dance constitutes a true recapturing of… freedom and childish play.
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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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Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times.
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The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. Bodies never lie.
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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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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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From this voyage no one returns poor or weary.
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No white man uses his feet the way an Indian does. He talks to the earth.
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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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great artists can be uncertain. Of course they are while strugggling to find solutions.
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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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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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Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little.
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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 universe lies before you on the floor, in the air, in the mysterious bodies of your dancers, in your mind.
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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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The creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second rate.
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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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What have we got here in America that we believe we cannot live without?
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Who am I?, the artist asks. And he devotes his whole life to finding out.
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No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made.
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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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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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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