Collenette Ballet Quotes

Maybe people have no idea how much work is behind a picture. It can seem very effortless, but there is a lot of work. It's exactly like doing ballet. It's hours and hours, but when you go onstage, it's just the pleasure of dancing. ~ Carine Roitfeld

At our theaters we only see feeble copies of the copies that have proceeded them, renounce that slavish routine which keeps your art in its infancy; examine everything relative to the development of talents; be original; form a style for yourselves based on your private studies; if you must copy, imitate nature, it is a noble model and never misleads those who follow it. ~ Jean-Georges Noverre

The real beauty in life is that beauty can sometimes occur. ~ Colum McCann

I used to dance when I was younger - ballet and modern dance. ~ Nastassja Kinski

I found at a young age that emotions aren't always handled with talking and other emotions. I started ballet, seriously around fourteen, and let me tell you, nothing can give you an emotional reset like a good ballet barre. ~ Michael Adam Hamilton

Baseball is a ballet without music. Drama without words. ~ Ernie Harwell

Think of a ballet dancer at the barre. Plie, eleve, battement tendu. She is practicing, because she knows that there is no difference between practice and art. The practice is the art. ~ Dani Shapiro

But he had never seen Myrna in practice...never that close up. He had been impressed and a little frightened by the contrast between seeing ballet on stange, where everyone seemed to either glide or mince effortlessly on the tips of their pointes. and seeing it from less than five feet away, with harsh daylight pouring in the floor-to-ceiling windows and no music- only the choreographer rythmically clapping his hands and yelling harsh criticisms. No praise, only criticisms. Their faces ran with sweat. Their leotards were wet with sweat. The room, as large and airy as it way, stank of sweat. Sleek muscles trembled and fluttered on the nervous edge of exhaustion. Corded tendons stood out like insulated cables. Throbbing veins popped out on foreheads and necks. Except for the choreographer's clapping and angry, hectoring shouts, the only sounds were the thrup-thud of ballet dancers on pointe moving across the floor and harsh, agonized panting for breath. Jack had suddenly realized that these dancers were not just earning a living, they were killing themselves. Most of all he remembered their expressions- all that exhausted concentration, all that pain... but transcending the pain, or at least creeping around its edges, he had seen joy. Joy was unmistakably what that look was, and it scared Jack because it had seemed inexplicable. ~ Stephen King

Dance design is not simply one element; it is that without which ballet cannot exist. As aria is to opera, words to poetry, color to painting, so sequence in steps - their syntax, idiom, vocabulary - are the stuff of stage dancing. ~ Lincoln Kirstein

Most ballet teachers in the United States are terrible. If they were in medicine, everyone would be poisoned. ~ George Balanchine

I thought 'Out of Africa' would be a beautiful ballet. ~ Amy Adams

The apex of perfection in equestrian art is not an exhibition of a great deal of different airs and movements by the same horse, but rather the conservation of the horse's enjoyment, suppleness and finesse during the performance, which calls for comparison with the finest ballet, or performance of an orchestra, or seeing a play by Racine, so moving is the sight of perfectly unisoned movements. ~ Nuno Oliveira

Harry went closer and could see she was attractive. And there was something about the relaxed way she spoke, the way she looked him straight in the eye, that suggested that she was also self-assured. A professional woman, he guessed. Something requiring a cool, rational mind. Estate agent, head of a department in a bank, politician or something like that. Well-off at any rate, of that he was fairly sure. It wasn't just the coat and the colossal house behind her, but something in the attitude and the high, aristocratic cheekbones. She walked down the steps as if walking along a straight line, made it seem easy. Ballet lessons, Harry thought. ~ Jo Nesbo

If Balanchine had any secret, it was one that has endured through two hundred years of classical ballet. It is that dancing correctly in three dimensions, on the music, creates the fourth dimension of meaning. ~ Arlene Croce

No matter the style, the farther one goes the more obstacles increase, and the more distant appears the object it is desired to attain. Again, the most strenuous labor affords the greatest artists but a disquieting gleam which only reveals their inadequacy, while the self-satisfied ignoramus surrounded by the deepest gloom flatters himself that he has nothing more to learn. ~ Jean-Georges Noverre

The classical ballet world is so exclusive and small, and a lot of people don't know about it. ~ Misty Copeland

You go to the ballet and you see girls dancing on their tiptoes. Why don't they just get taller girls? ~ Greg Ray

Being in ballet class, being on the stage, being surrounded by my peers at American Ballet Theater every day, keeps me so humble and grounded. Being in ballet class, I feel, is like this meditation for me every morning. ~ Misty Copeland

That day and night, the bleeding and the screaming, had knocked something askew for Esme, like a picture swinging crooked on a wall. She loved the life she lived with her mother. It was beautiful. It was, she sometimes thought, a sweet emulation of the fairy tales they cherished in their lovely, gold-edged books. They sewed their own clothes from bolts of velvet and silk, ate all their meals as picnics, indoors or out, and danced on the rooftop, cutting passageways through the fog with their bodies. They embroidered tapestries of their own design, wove endless melodies on their violins, charted the course of the moon each month, and went to the theater and the ballet as often as they liked--every night last week to see Swan Lake again and again. Esme herself could dance like a faerie, climb trees like a squirrel, and sit so still in the park that birds would come to perch on her. Her mother had taught her all that, and for years it had been enough. But she wasn't a little girl anymore, and she had begun to catch hints and glints of another world outside her pretty little life, one filled with spice and poetry and strangers. ~ Laini Taylor

Instead of watching cartoons when I was little, I had Russian ballet videos from, like, the 1950s and 1940s. ~ Sarah Hay

The sex act is emotionally the richest and the most imaginatively charged event in our lives, comparable only to the embrace of our children as a source of affection and mystery. But no kinaesthetic language has yet been devised to describe it in detail, and without one we are in the position of an unqualified observer viewing an operation for brain surgery. Ballet, gymnastics, American football and judo are furnished with elaborate kinaesthetic languages, but it's still easier to describe the tango or the cockpit take-off procedures for a 747 than to recount in detail an act of love. ~ J.G. Ballard

I do everything the man does, only backwards and in high heels! ~ Ginger Rogers

Ballet for a rainy day Silent film of melting miracle play Dancing out there through my window To the backdrop of a slow descending grey ~ Andy Partridge

He dances well to whom Fortune pipes. ~ John Ray

They had extemporized a verse made up of two insults about matters over which the victim had no control: the color of her skin and speculations on the sleeping habits of an adult, widely fitting in its incoherence. That they themselves were black, or that their own father had similarly relaxed habits was irrelevant. It was their contempt for their own blackness that gave the first insult it's teeth. They seem to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds - cooled - and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path. They danced a macabre ballet around the victim, whom, for their own sake, they were prepared to sacrifice to the flaming pit. ~ Toni Morrison

When I was about 12, I was studying Chinese and ballet with my brother, and one morning Jonathan said to me, 'I don't think I'm going to go to ballet class anymore,' and I looked at him and said, 'You know, I don't think I'm going to go to Chinese class anymore.' ~ Damian Woetzel

I can see why they named that ballet the Nutcracker. It's gotta hurt having 'em crushed in something that tight. ~ Mark A. Cooper

Miss Dearheart gave him a very brief look, and shook her head. There was movement under the table, a small fleshy kind of noise and the drunk suddenly bent forward, colour draining from his face. Probably only he and Moist heard Miss Dearheart purr: 'What is sticking in your foot is a Mitzy "Pretty Lucretia" four-inch heel, the most dangerous footwear in the world. Considered as pounds per square inch, it's like being trodden on by a very pointy elephant. Now, I know what you're thinking: you're thinking, "Could she press it all the way through to the floor?" And, you know, I'm not sure about that myself. The sole of your boot might give me a bit of trouble, but nothing else will. But that's not the worrying part. The worrying part is that I was forced practically at knifepoint to take ballet lessons as a child, which means I can kick like a mule; you are sitting in front of me; and I have another shoe . Good, I can see you have worked that out. I'm going to withdraw the heel now.'

There was a small 'pop' from under the table. With great care the man stood up, turned and, without a backward glance, lurched unsteadily away.

'Can I bother you?' said Moist. Miss Dearheart nodded, and he sat down, with his legs crossed. 'He was only a drunk,' he ventured.

'Yes, men say that sort of thing,' said Miss Dearheart. ~ Terry Pratchett

A genius is a talented person who does his homework. ~ Thomas A. Edison

I don't force myself to exercise; I find going to gyms really boring. I find it easier to go for a fast walk or a jog in Central Park. I wear sensible shoes because my ballet dancing left me with a bunion on one foot after all the pointe exercises. ~ Sarah Brightman

My mother and my father always had me in ballet and dance, and I sang in a girl's group. ~ Jessica White

I was a dancer from a young age. My parents were dancers; we were taken to a lot of ballet as children. It occurred to me that what I liked more than dancing the steps was acting the story of whatever particular performance I was taking part in. ~ Elizabeth Debicki

For Russians, to whom Pushkin's poem 'Eugene Onegin' is sacred text, the ballet's story and personae are as familiar and filled with meaning as, for instance, 'Romeo' and 'Hamlet' are for us. Russians know whole stretches of it by heart, the way we know Shakespeare and Italians know Dante. ~ Robert Gottlieb

Figure skating is an unlikely Olympic event but its good television. It's sort of a combination of gymnastics and ballet. A little sexy too which doesn't hurt. ~ Andy Rooney

Lesbians, homosexuals, masochism, sadism are not perversions. Actually, there are only two perversions: hockey on grass and ballet on ice. ~ Faina Ranevskaya

I was serious about ballet for a long time, but my mom got me into tap and jazz and modern and hip-hop, and I was one of those over-lessoned children. ~ Greta Gerwig

My career came together very quickly. I only trained for four years before I became a professional, so I didn't have a lot of time to sit back and be inspired before I took my first ballet class. ~ Misty Copeland

Culture in America and everywhere else comes from the suffering, from those who don't want the old ways. They want to bring in the new, whether it's the ballet, when it started, or Shakespeare. ~ Russell Simmons

I have a lot of intention behind what I put out there. The reason all this stuff I do works together, the environmental and social, collaborating with ballet companies to score a show, the bike tour - all of that stuff comes together through community building with music. ~ Ben Sollee

Me in high school, I was kind of a loner. I had a handful of friends. I'd eat my lunch in my car every day in my senior year. I went to ballet. I was a ballerina, so I was very focused on that. You kind of have to be. That was two-thirds of my week, going to ballet class. ~ Olesya Rulin

My grandmother had a Miss Margaret's School of Dance to teach tap and ballet to kids, but I never studied it. I was raised a Mormon and they're dancing fools. It's the only vice they have - dancing. ~ Michelle Shocked

I deliberately made an effort not to become an expert on the ballet. ~ Robert Caro