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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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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
Space
Idea
Stills
Pot
Still
Tea
Ideas
Privacy
Need
Dance
Needs
Walking
Make
Needed
More quotes by 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
No white man uses his feet the way an Indian does. He talks to the earth.
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
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
Many other women have kicked higher, balanced longer, or turned faster. These are poor substitutes for passion.
Agnes de Mille
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
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
A good education is usually harmful to a dancer. A good calf is better than a good head.
Agnes de Mille
We can't stand silence, because silence induces thinking. And if we thought, we would have to face ourselves.
Agnes de Mille
Friends die one by one, but so, thank God, do enemies.
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
Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times.
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
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
Dance in the body you have.
Agnes de Mille
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
My heroines are part of me and my heroes are part of what I'd like to know.
Agnes de Mille
The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. Bodies never lie.
Agnes de Mille
The creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second rate.
Agnes de Mille
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
