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A good education is usually harmful to a dancer. A good calf is better than a good head.

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
Better
Calves
Good
Harmful
Ballet
Dancer
Dance
Usually
Head
Education
Calf

More quotes by Agnes de Mille

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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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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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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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My heroines are part of me and my heroes are part of what I'd like to know.
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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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I studied the way I danced- to the point of dropping.
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Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times.
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Who am I?, the artist asks. And he devotes his whole life to finding out.
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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 truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. Bodies never lie.
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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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Dance in the body you have.
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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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No white man uses his feet the way an Indian does. He talks to the earth.
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There is something fearfully strengthening about cutting free even if the ties bandage the heart itself.
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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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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
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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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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