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

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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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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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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There is something fearfully strengthening about cutting free even if the ties bandage the heart itself.
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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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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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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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Living is a form of not being sure, not know what next or how... The artists never entirely knows.
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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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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Dance constitutes a true recapturing of... freedom and childish play.
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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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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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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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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Dancers aren't made of their technique, but their passion.
Agnes de Mille
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I want one word on my tombstone - dancer.
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