Agnes De Mille Quotes

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.

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

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.

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. So she may have noticed something. In any case, in order to patrol the situation, she enrolled in his courses. And, as we bore the same name, she was seated beside me where not the flickering of an eyelash escaped her attention. I never have heard of this happening to anyone else in the history of education.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

I want one word on my tombstone - dancer.

Dance in the body you have.

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.

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.

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

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.

Ballet technique never becomes easy, it becomes possible

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.

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.

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

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