Agnes De Mille Quotes

No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made. Destiny is made known silently.

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.

The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. Bodies never lie.

Then I did the simplest thing in the world. I leaned down... and kissed him. And the world cracked open.

A good education is usually harmful to a dancer. A good calf is better than a good head.

Who am I?, the artist asks. And he devotes his whole life to finding out.

Many other women have kicked higher, balanced longer, or turned faster. These are poor substitutes for passion.

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.

Dancers aren't made of their technique, but their passion.

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.

The creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second rate.

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.

We can't stand silence, because silence induces thinking. And if we thought, we would have to face ourselves.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times.

Ballet technique never becomes easy, it becomes possible

To make up a dance, I still need, as I needed then, a pot of tea, walking space, privacy and an idea.

Living is a form of not being sure, not know what next or how... The artists never entirely knows.

Toe dancing is a dandy attention getter, second only to screaming.

Dance in the body you have.

I want one word on my tombstone - dancer.

No white man uses his feet the way an Indian does. He talks to the earth.

Dance constitutes a true recapturing of... freedom and childish play.

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.

There is something fearfully strengthening about cutting free even if the ties bandage the heart itself.

My heroines are part of me and my heroes are part of what I'd like to know.

Friends die one by one, but so, thank God, do enemies.

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.

I studied the way I danced- to the point of dropping.

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