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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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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
Attention
Folks
Understand
Politician
Song
Dance
Look
Songs
Looks
Pay
Listen
Dances
Nation
Folk
Nations
Politicians

More quotes by 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.
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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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Then I did the simplest thing in the world. I leaned down... and kissed him. And the world cracked open.
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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 creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second rate.
Agnes de Mille
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Dancers aren't made of their technique, but their passion.
Agnes de Mille
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There is something fearfully strengthening about cutting free even if the ties bandage the heart itself.
Agnes de Mille
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I want one word on my tombstone - dancer.
Agnes de Mille
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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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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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I studied the way I danced- to the point of dropping.
Agnes de Mille
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Dance constitutes a true recapturing of... freedom and childish play.
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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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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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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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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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.
Agnes de Mille
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Dance in the body you have.
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