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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
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
There is something fearfully strengthening about cutting free even if the ties bandage the heart itself.
Agnes de Mille
Friends die one by one, but so, thank God, do enemies.
Agnes de Mille
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
The creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second rate.
Agnes de Mille
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
I studied the way I danced- to the point of dropping.
Agnes de Mille
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
No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made. Destiny is made known silently.
Agnes de Mille
Who am I?, the artist asks. And he devotes his whole life to finding out.
Agnes de Mille
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
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
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
Many other women have kicked higher, balanced longer, or turned faster. These are poor substitutes for passion.
Agnes de Mille
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
Dance constitutes a true recapturing of... freedom and childish play.
Agnes de Mille
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
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
The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. Bodies never lie.
Agnes de Mille
Ballet technique never becomes easy, it becomes possible
Agnes de Mille
