Agnes de Mille quotes

The truest expression of a people is in its dance and its music. Bodies never lie.
- Agnes de Mille

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

I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that I could be.
- 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

Dance in the body you have.
- Agnes de Mille

Dancers aren't made of their technique, but their passion.
- Agnes de Mille

The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.
- 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

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

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

A good education is usually harmful to a dancer. A good calf is better than a good head.
- Agnes de Mille

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

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

I fell in love with the young assistant professor who took me through my first poetry course. Really in love--that is, enough to alarm Mother. Although naturally I never breathed my feelings to a soul--although naturally the first time she suggested that I might invite him home for tea I went to my room and shook for forty minutes.
- Agnes de Mille

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

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 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

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

But remember that intent is everything. One does not just jump, one lifts into the air, one rises. In the same way the lifted leg of an arabesque becomes a wing, and not a mechanical leverage like a raised trap door. This is the precise difference between dancing and acrobatics. The dancer tries to express something; the acrobat merely pulls, raises, stretches and grinds. The acrobat is lost in a web of muscles the dancer is all but invisible in projected idea.
- 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

Friends die one by one, but so, thank God, do enemies.
- Agnes de Mille