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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
Passion
Ballet
Poor
Balanced
Women
Dancer
Many
Faster
Turned
Pointe
Dance
Choreography
Higher
Kicked
Longer
Substitutes

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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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Ballet technique never becomes easy, it becomes possible
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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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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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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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Toe dancing is a dandy attention getter, second only to screaming.
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Who am I?, the artist asks. And he devotes his whole life to finding out.
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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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The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. Bodies never lie.
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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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Dance in the body you have.
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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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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 want one word on my tombstone - dancer.
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One of the good things about my having some recognition is that I can do something for the people I think ought to have more and correct some of the matters fate fails to take care of.
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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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Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times. The dancers don't even look at one another. 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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My heroines are part of me and my heroes are part of what I'd like to know.
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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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