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When I dance I am really meditating rather then performing for an audience. I am completely absorbed by the music and the steps I choose to respond to the music.

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
Steps
Audience
Meditating
Rather
Absorbed
Music
Respond
Really
Performing
Dance
Completely
Choose

More quotes by Agnes de Mille

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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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Dance constitutes a true recapturing of... freedom and childish play.
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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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Who am I?, the artist asks. And he devotes his whole life to finding out.
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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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Living is a form of not being sure, not know what next or how... The artists never entirely knows.
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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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There is something fearfully strengthening about cutting free even if the ties bandage the heart itself.
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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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The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. Bodies never lie.
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We can't stand silence, because silence induces thinking. And if we thought, we would have to face ourselves.
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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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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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No white man uses his feet the way an Indian does. He talks to the earth.
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I studied the way I danced- to the point of dropping.
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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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Find the passion. It takes great passion and great energy to do anything creative. I would go so far as to say you can't do it without that passion.
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I want one word on my tombstone - dancer.
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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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