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Many other women have kicked higher, balanced longer, or turned faster. These are poor substitutes for passion.

Agnes de Mille

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Agnes de Mille
Age: 88 †
Born: 1905
Born: September 18
Died: 1993
Died: October 6
Ballet Dancer
Ballet Master
Choreographer
Dancer
Theatrical Director
Harlem
New York
Turned
Pointe
Dance
Choreography
Higher
Kicked
Longer
Substitutes
Passion
Ballet
Poor
Balanced
Women
Dancer
Many
Faster

More quotes by Agnes de Mille

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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. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.
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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 creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second rate.
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Dance in the body you have.
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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, 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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Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times.
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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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Ballet technique never becomes easy, it becomes possible
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The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. Bodies never lie.
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There is something fearfully strengthening about cutting free even if the ties bandage the heart itself.
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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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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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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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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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I studied the way I danced- to the point of dropping.
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Then I did the simplest thing in the world. I leaned down... and kissed him. And the world cracked open.
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No white man uses his feet the way an Indian does. He talks to the earth.
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Toe dancing is a dandy attention getter, second only to screaming.
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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.
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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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