Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Agnes de Mille

Image
Dance constitutes a true recapturing of... freedom and childish play.
Agnes de Mille
Image
I want one word on my tombstone - dancer.
Agnes de Mille
Image
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.
Agnes de Mille
Image
Who am I?, the artist asks. And he devotes his whole life to finding out.
Agnes de Mille
Image
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.
Agnes de Mille
Image
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.
Agnes de Mille
Image
My heroines are part of me and my heroes are part of what I'd like to know.
Agnes de Mille
Image
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.
Agnes de Mille
Image
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.
Agnes de Mille
Image
There is something fearfully strengthening about cutting free even if the ties bandage the heart itself.
Agnes de Mille
Image
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
Image
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.
Agnes de Mille
Image
Toe dancing is a dandy attention getter, second only to screaming.
Agnes de Mille
Image
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.
Agnes de Mille
Image
The creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second rate.
Agnes de Mille
Image
We can't stand silence, because silence induces thinking. And if we thought, we would have to face ourselves.
Agnes de Mille
Image
The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. Bodies never lie.
Agnes de Mille
Image
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.
Agnes de Mille
Image
No white man uses his feet the way an Indian does. He talks to the earth.
Agnes de Mille
Image
Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times.
Agnes de Mille