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The creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second rate.

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
Passion
Urge
Creative
Urges
Anything
Demon
Rate
Accept
Creativity
Accepting
Second
Satanic

More quotes by Agnes de Mille

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Toe dancing is a dandy attention getter, second only to screaming.
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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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Many other women have kicked higher, balanced longer, or turned faster. These are poor substitutes for passion.
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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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Friends die one by one, but so, thank God, do enemies.
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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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I want one word on my tombstone - dancer.
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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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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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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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Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times.
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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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
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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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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
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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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No white man uses his feet the way an Indian does. He talks to the earth.
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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Then I did the simplest thing in the world. I leaned down... and kissed him. And the world cracked open.
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