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Agnes de Mille
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“Ballet technique is arbitrary and very difficult. It never becomes easy; it becomes possible.”
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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. What I could not learn was to think creatively on schedule.”
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“No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made. Destiny is made known silently.”
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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 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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“... 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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“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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“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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“A good education is usually harmful to a dancer. A good calf is better than a good head.”
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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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“When you perform ... you are out of yourself — larger and more potent, more beautiful. You are for minutes heroic. This is power. This is glory on earth. And it is yours, nightly.”
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“[On the son of Rebecca West and H.G. Wells:] Anthony West ... looks very like his father, but is much more gracious — he could hardly be less.”
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“... great artists can be uncertain. Of course they are while strugggling to find solutions. Tolstoi's scripts are almost indecipherable. 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. 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. What they wanted was something newly experienced, and therefore unknown and hard to attain.”
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“No white man uses his feet the way an Indian does. He talks to the earth.”
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“The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music.”
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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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“Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what's next or how. The moment you know how you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.”
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“Friends die one by one, but so, thank God, do enemies.”
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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. From this voyage no one returns poor or weary.”
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“The creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second-rate.”
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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. 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.”
Agnes de Mille, U.S. dancer, choreographer
(1905 - 1993)
Full name: Agnes George de Mille.