Alvin Ailey Quotes

DeFrantz's study ... is not the first book about the protean Ailey, who was born in hardscrabble Texas in 1931 and died in 1989 after creating close to 80 works. But it is perhaps the most comprehensive, combining biography, criticism, the analysis of dance criticism, and a sort of corporate history, siting the now firmly established Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in the international cultural landscape. ~ Alvin Ailey

Money is a never-ending problem. ~ Alvin Ailey

Making dances is an act of progress; it is an act of growth, an act of music, an act of teaching, an act of celebration, an act of joy. ~ Alvin Ailey

One of the worst things about racism is what it does to young people. ~ Alvin Ailey

When I came to New York, to Brooklyn, I met Alvin Ailey and Stanley Crouch and August Wilson. They were always putting things in a philosophical context. All the great jazz musicians did, too. There was always a sub-context to what they were saying about music even though they would be very down home and earthy. So I started to develop, in addition to my power and ability to simply hear, a way to place myself in a time. ~ Wynton Marsalis

After all these years of saying the same thing about the Alvin Ailey company - terrific dancers, awful repertory - I'm finally accepting the inevitable: I'm not going to change my mind, and they're not going to change their ways. And why should they, given their juggernaut success all over the world? ~ Robert Gottlieb

I'm born originally in Toronto, and I have what I call my 'Fame' story. I took a Greyhound bus and went to Alvin Ailey and received Dunham, Horton, Graham technique there, but I could never take my eyes off of Balanchine doing 'Nutcracker'; to me he's the best who ever did it. ~ Laurieann Gibson

I'm attracted to long-legged girls with long arms and a little head. ~ Alvin Ailey

Nothing personal; I just don't have people over. ~ Alvin Ailey

I always want more. ~ Alvin Ailey

I wanted to explore black culture, and I wanted that culture to be a revelation. ~ Alvin Ailey

My feelings about myself have been terrible. ~ Alvin Ailey

But the dance speaks to everyone. Otherwise it wouldn't work. ~ Alvin Ailey

Sometimes you feel bad about yourself when there's no reason to. ~ Alvin Ailey

Boy - before intense anxiety had crushed his chances for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and sent him into the awful mental decline in which he'd been made a vampire. ~ Anne Rice

I wanted to be an Ailey dancer. I would watch Alvin Ailey videos over and over, and I'd picture myself doing that. I was obsessed with it. ~ Robert Battle

I am trying to show the world that we are all human beings and that color is not important. What is important is the quality of our work. ~ Alvin Ailey

I was used to dancing, but only when someone told you what to do. So in the nightclub I was all over the place, I combined everything. Street dance, modern dance, a bit of jazz and ballet, I was Twyla Tharp, I was Alvin Ailey, I was Michael Jackson. I didn't care, I was free. ~ Madonna Ciccone

To be who you are and become what you are capable of is the only goal worth living. ~ Alvin Ailey

My dancers must be able to do anything, and I don't care if they are black or white or purple or green. I want to help show my people how beautiful they are. I want to hold up the mirror to my audience that says this is the way people can be, this is how open people can be. ~ Alvin Ailey

In this business, life is one long fund-raising effort. ~ Alvin Ailey

If you live in the elite world of dance, you find yourself in a world rife with racism. Let's face it. ~ Alvin Ailey

Racism tears down your insides so that no matter what you achieve, you're not quite up to snuff. ~ Alvin Ailey

I always want to have more dancers in my company. ~ Alvin Ailey

Everything in dancing is style, allusion, the essence of many thoughts and feelings. The abstraction of many moments. ~ Alvin Ailey

My dad is a director/producer and my mom is a dancer; she performed with Alvin Ailey, but I didn't even think about becoming an actress. ~ Sanaa Lathan

I danced growing up. I had two friends of mine that, actually, one of them wound up dancing with Alvin Ailey. ~ Lisa Ann Walter

It will take very sophisticated marketing to achieve our aim of bringing more black people into the theater. ~ Alvin Ailey

As long as there are dancers around who love to dance, there will be an Alvin Ailey American Dance Company. We miss him so much, but he's alive as soon as you see a dancer hit the stage. ~ Judith Jamison

We still spend more time chasing funds than we do in the studio in creative work. ~ Alvin Ailey

The way Alvin Ailey has transformed modern dance and dance in general is the fact of variety. It's a cornucopia of ways to move. There are choreographers in the company as - as diverse, as different from each other as Donald McKayle and Bill T. Jones, or Jawole Zollar and John Butler, Lar Lubovitch, you know, and Judith Jamison. ~ Judith Jamison

All my life I've been fascinated by the precipice in all of us. When you come to it, you either choose to fall or you don't
Alvin Ailey ~ Kathy Petrakis

I went to see John Mayall at the Marquee, with Peter Green on guitar, and that was a particularly good gig. ~ Alvin Lee

It wasn't until the movie came out that it all changed for us. Some people say it was the start of Ten Years After, but in another way, it was the beginning of the end. ~ Alvin Lee

There is not one iota of history as we know it in the entire Bible! ~ Alvin Boyd Kuhn

I work virtually every waking hour. ~ Alvin Toffler

The hardest part of growing old is remembering what it was like when you were young. Alvin in The Straight Story (movie) ~ Dan Carruthers

I think a lot of modern day guitarists start off playing like Eddie van Halen, and they don't take the time to learn the basics. ~ Alvin Lee

In America the government took the land from the Indians and then established laws protecting private property. ~ Alvin Francis Poussaint

I think I'll continue to work as a solo artist. ~ Alvin Lee

Every generation gets a chance to change the world Pity the nation that won't listen to your boys and girls Cos the sweetest melody is the one we haven't heard ~ Alvin Toffler

Idea-assassins rush forward to kill any new suggestion on the grounds of its impracticality, while defending whatever now exists as practical, no matter how absurd. ~ Alvin Toffler

The Giants were supposed to have a new motto, 'Shut up and deal.' ~ Alvin Dark

One of the most highly developed skills in contemporary Western civilization is dissection: the split -up of problems into their smallest possible components. We are good at it. So good, we often forget to put the pieces back together again. ~ Alvin Toffler

Individuals need life structure. A life lacking in comprehensible structure is an aimless wreck. The absence of structure breeds breakdown.
Structure provides the relatively fixed points of reference we need. That is why, for many people, a job is crucial psychologically, over and above the paycheck. By making clear demands on their time and energy, it provides an element of structure around which the rest of their lives can be organized. The absolute demands imposed on a parent by an infant, the responsibility to care for an invalid, the tight discipline demanded by membership in a church or, in some countries, a political party - all these may also impose a simple structure on life. ~ Alvin Toffler

Behind Alystra was the known world, full of wonder yet empty of surprise, drifting like a brilliant but tightly closed bubble down the river of time. Ahead, separated from her by no more than the span of a few footsteps, was the empty wilderness - the world of the desert - the world of the Invaders. Alvin ~ Arthur C. Clarke

Most managers were trained to be the thing they most despise - bureaucrats. ~ Alvin Toffler

If nothing in life challenges us, we will remain unchallenged by life. ~ Alvin Conway

It would be a mistake to assume that the present day educational system is unchanging. On the contrary, it is undergoing rapid change. But much of this change is no more than an attempt to refine the existent machinery, making it ever more efficient in pursuit of obsolete goals. ~ Alvin Toffler

There is a big age gap between my sisters Janice and Irma and myself so I didn't know them that well when I was younger although they have been very supportive in later life. ~ Alvin Lee

To show that there are natural processes that produce religious belief does nothing, so far, to discredit it; perhaps God designed us in such a way that it is by virtue of those processes that we come to have knowledge of him. ~ Alvin Plantinga

Steve Bruce is like a cat on hot tin bricks. ~ Alvin Martin

It is better to have a short meaningful life than to have a long meaningless one. ~ Alvin Conway

I always did plays. When I was in kindergarten, I got chosen to be Alvin in 'The Chipmunks.' We did a Chipmunks song. I was always a natural performer. It was easy for me. I danced and I sang, and all that stuff. I felt like I'd be something in the arts, but it vacillated between being a dancer and a singer, or whatever. ~ Kari Matchett

You cannot get a new economy without a new society. ~ Alvin Toffler

By instructing students how to learn, unlearn and relearn, a powerful new dimension can be added to education. Psychologist Herbert Gerjuoy of the Human Resources Research Organization phrases it simply: 'The new education must teach the individual how to classify and reclassify information, how to evaluate its veracity, how to change categories when necessary, how to move from the concrete to the abstract and back, how to look at problems from a new direction - how to teach himself. Tomorrow's illiterate will not be the man who can't read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn. ~ Alvin Toffler

How goddamn foolish it is, the war. They's no war in the worth that's worth fightin' for. I don't care where it is. They can't tell me any different. Money, money is the thing that causes it all. I wouldn't be a bit surprised that the people that start wars and promote 'em are the men that make the money, make the ammunition, make the clothing and so forth. Just think of the poor kids that are starvin' to death in Asia and so forth that could be fed with how much you make one big shell of. ~Alvin "Tommy" Bridges ~ Studs Terkel

The Law of Raspberry Jam: the wider any culture is spread, the thinner it gets. ~ Alvin Toffler

Things don't look hopeful for Darwinian naturalists. ~ Alvin Plantinga

We will only keep people from fleeing the countryside into urban favelas, villas miseries, shantytowns and squatter villages when the productivity gap is closed between what brute labor on the soil can accomplish and what advanced technology makes possible today - and will make possible tomorrow. ~ Alvin Toffler

I'm against anything atheists represent because I believe in God. ~ Alvin Holmes

Much education springs from some image of the future. If the image of the future held by a society is grossly inaccurate, its education system will betray its youth. ~ Alvin Toffler

Strangely enough, I wasn't into fast guitarists. I preferred Peter Green's subtle touch. I saw him with John Mayall's Bluesbreakers at the Marquee Club in London and was very impressed. He was the only guitarist I've ever seen to turn the volume control on his guitar down during a solo. ~ Alvin Lee

He was destined to die lying in the dust with a knife in his ribs anyway. A pointless death. He'd always known it. Ailey was the only one who had ever asked for him to be anything more. ~ Jeannie Lin

If you don't have a strategy, you're part of someone else's strategy. ~ Alvin Toffler

Another meaning of 'Word' in Lutheran theology says it is only through the Word that Christians are kept and sustained in their faith. That is why Christians must not neglect the Word of God. They need to read it regularly in devotions at home, hear it preached in church, and study it with fellow Christians in Bible classes or similar settings. ~ Alvin Schmidt

In the year 2000 an illiterate person will not be someone who can't read or write, but someone who is not able to learn, unlearn and learn again. ~ Alvin Toffler

If we don't know that there is such a person as God, we don't know the first thing (the most important thing) about ourselves, each other and our world. This is because the most important truths about us and them, is that we have been created by the Lord, and utterly depend upon him for our continued existence. ~ Alvin Plantinga

Back in those days we thought we could change the world. ~ Alvin Lee

Life tol'ably queer. You think you've got a grip on it, then you open your hands and you find there's nothing in them. ~ Alvin C. York

Appreciate the power of rumor, often malicious, no matter how preposterous, within the local populations you are seeking to help. ~ Alvin Adams

ELIZABETH SIROIS WHARTON, 87, passed away peacefully on May 29, 2010, at Warsaw County Memorial Hospital. She was born on January 19, 1923, the son of Marcel and Catherine Sirois. She is survived by her brother, Henry Sirois, her sister, Charlotte Gibney, her niece, Holly Gibney, and her daughter, Janelle Patterson. Elizabeth was predeceased by her husband, Alvin Wharton, and her beloved daughter, Olivia. Private visitation will be held from 10 AM to 1 PM at Soames Funeral Home ~ Stephen King

He rolled her on the bed and turned so he could look at her. 'Are you hurt?' His stomach lurched in the seconds it took her to answer. 'I'm happy.' She opened her eyes and looked at him shyly. 'I'm glad for this. I'm glad that it was you.' Her tiger's eyes glowed in vibrant gold and green. A surge of possessiveness clawed at him, like talons around his heart. He had wild thoughts about taking her with him. They could keep on running, accountable to no one but each other. She'd never have to marry a man she didn't want. But that was what his life had always been. Ailey needed more. She needed honour, tradition and family. Yet she'd chosen him. She'd given herself without reservation. The knowledge stunned him. It made him believe that he could be more. He kissed her. It was the only way to stop thinking. He was never a thinking man anyway. He kissed her again, then released her lips to move his mouth over her breast, sliding his tongue over her nipple, sucking gently until he could feel her squirm beneath him. He ran his hands over her satiny skin until her breath caught and she whispered his name, her breath fanning soft against his ear. He had never gone hard so quickly. When he entered her moments later, she closed around him and he moved within her, lifting and lowering as he waited for the dark pleasure to overcome him. But it wouldn't. Not completely. Through the slick heat and the unbelievable tightness gripping him, Ailey was there. When he shut his eyes, he saw her fa ~ Jeannie Lin

We also did something called the Texas Peace Festival, which was actually a better gig both musically, and in the way it was organised. ~ Alvin Lee

When the clock struck twelve, you dropped whatever you were doing and you went and ate your lunch. You had to have your priorities straight, and Alvin Hobbs figured his priorities were as straight as an arrow. Hunting ~ Scott Langrel