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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.

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
Winning
Equivalent
Hours
Ballet
Process
Match
Energy
Required
Happens
Tennis
Writing
Dance
Roughly
Work
Novel
Simultaneously
Feet
Exhausting

More quotes by Agnes de Mille

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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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My heroines are part of me and my heroes are part of what I'd like to know.
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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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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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Who am I?, the artist asks. And he devotes his whole life to finding out.
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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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Ballet technique never becomes easy, it becomes possible
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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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There is something fearfully strengthening about cutting free even if the ties bandage the heart itself.
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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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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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No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made. Destiny is made known silently.
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I studied the way I danced- to the point of dropping.
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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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Dance in the body you have.
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Friends die one by one, but so, thank God, do enemies.
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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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No white man uses his feet the way an Indian does. He talks to the earth.
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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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The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. Bodies never lie.
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