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

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Friends die one by one, but so, thank God, do enemies.
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Who am I?, the artist asks. And he devotes his whole life to finding out.
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Many other women have kicked higher, balanced longer, or turned faster. These are poor substitutes for passion.
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No white man uses his feet the way an Indian does. He talks to the earth.
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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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I studied the way I danced- to the point of dropping.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Toe dancing is a dandy attention getter, second only to screaming.
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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 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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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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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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