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Dance constitutes a true recapturing of... freedom and childish play.

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
Play
Childish
Constitutes
Dance
Freedom
True

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.
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.
Agnes de Mille
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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.
Agnes de Mille
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The creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second rate.
Agnes de Mille
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I studied the way I danced- to the point of dropping.
Agnes de Mille
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No white man uses his feet the way an Indian does. He talks to the earth.
Agnes de Mille
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Who am I?, the artist asks. And he devotes his whole life to finding out.
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.
Agnes de Mille
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My heroines are part of me and my heroes are part of what I'd like to know.
Agnes de Mille
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Friends die one by one, but so, thank God, do enemies.
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.
Agnes de Mille
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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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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
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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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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.
Agnes de Mille
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The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. Bodies never lie.
Agnes de Mille
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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.
Agnes de Mille
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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.
Agnes de Mille
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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
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Ballet technique never becomes easy, it becomes possible
Agnes de Mille