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

More quotes by 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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Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times.
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Ballet technique never becomes easy, it becomes possible
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The creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second rate.
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Dancers aren't made of their technique, but their passion.
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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.
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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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Dance constitutes a true recapturing of... freedom and childish play.
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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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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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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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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Many other women have kicked higher, balanced longer, or turned faster. These are poor substitutes for passion.
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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There is something fearfully strengthening about cutting free even if the ties bandage the heart itself.
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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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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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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No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made. Destiny is made known silently.
Agnes de Mille