Nijinsky Quotes

I danced frightening things. They were frightened of me and therefore thought that I wanted to kill them. I did not want to kill anyone. I loved everyone, but no one loved me, and therefore I became nervous. ~ Vaslav Nijinsky

if my memory serves me right, here is my genealogical line: Boccaccio, Petronius, Rabelais, Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Maeterlinck, Romain Rolland, Plotinus, Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Dostoievsky (and other Russian writers of the Nineteenth Century), the ancient Greek dramatists, theElizabethan dramatists (excluding Shakespeare), Theodore Dreiser, Knut Hamsun, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Elie Faure, Oswald Spengler, Marcel Proust, Van Gogh, the Dadaists and Surrealists, Balzac, Lewis Carroll, Nijinsky, Rimbaud, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Giono, Celine, everything I read on Zen Buddhism, everything I read about China, India, Tibet, Arabia, Africa, and of course the Bible, the men who wrote it and especially the men who made the King James version, for it was the language of the Bible rather than its "message" which I got first and which I will never shake off. ~ Henry Miller

I am not crying, but have tears in my heart. ~ Vaslav Nijinsky

People like eccentrics. Therefore they will leave me alone, saying that I am a mad clown. ~ Vaslav Nijinsky

We're fighting for unhappiness?" Noah asked skeptically. "It sounds a bit crazy when you put it that way."
Nijinsky laughed, delighted. "Oh, it is." Then, serious again, he said, "We fight for the right to be what we choose,to feel what we choose. Even if what we choose seems crazy to others."
"If it's all the same to you, I'll fight for revenge," Sadie said.
Nijinsky's eyes glittered. "Oh, yes. That's fine with me. ~ Michael Grant

I suppose I'm the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it's the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other. ~ Alan Bennett

I do not like eating meat because I have seen lambs and pigs killed. I saw and felt their pain. They felt the approaching death. I could not bear it. I cried like a child. I ran up a hill and could not breathe. I felt that I was choking. I felt the death of the lamb. ~ Vaslav Nijinsky

People have nothing to do and therefore they interfere with the life of others. I dont want to interfere with the life of others. ~ Vaslav Nijinsky

Applause is not opinion. Applause is a feeling of love for the artist. ~ Vaslav Nijinsky

Now I will dance you the war…. The war which you did not prevent. ~ Vaslav Nijinsky

The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart; For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have; Not universal love But to be loved alone. ~ W. H. Auden

Nijinsky in 'Le Spectre de la rose' was like nothing I'd seen before. He danced a fifteen-minute solo and it passed like a dream. He was wearing a silk tricot, palest nude, onto which were pinned dozens of silk Bakst petals, pink and red and purple. The most exotic creature, so beautiful, like a shiny, graceful insect on the verge of flight. He leapt as if it cost him no effort, lingering in the air far longer than was possible, and seemed not to touch the stage between times. I believed that night that a man might fly, that anything was possible. ~ Kate Morton

I am not an ape, I am a man. The world has been created by God. Man has been created by God. It is not possible for man to understand God - God understands God. Man is God and therefore understands God. I am God. I am a man. I am good and not a beast. I am an animal with reason. I have flesh, I *am* flesh, I am not descended from flesh. Flesh is created by God. I am God. I am God. I am God. ~ Vaslav Nijinsky

I am afraid of people because they want me to lead the same kind of life as they do. They want me to dance jolly and cheerful things. I do not like jollity. I love life. ~ Vaslav Nijinsky

because none of you know what you want follow me
because I'm not going anywhere
I'll just bleed so the stars can have something dark to shine in
look at my legs I am the Nijinsky of dreams ~ Frank Stanford

They are stupid, they are beasts, they are meat, they are death. I am talking simply but without any affectation. ~ Vaslav Nijinsky

Once you familiarize yourself with your tools, you should forget about them. It will only throw you off-balance. In all these 'rolling shit into little balls' types who spend hours of time and reams of paper saying nothing, literary masturbators, they concentrate on the vehicle more than what they want to produce. That impedes the end result and defeats the purpose. You must lose consciousness of the medium or mechanics to do the impossible. Like Nijinsky who explained how he gave the impression of hovering in mid-air – 'I just pause when I get there.' In a child-like way, real magicians innocently do the simplest thing. The objective is all they think about. I just want to make music the way I hear it. The ends justify the means, and the means become inconsequential. ~ Anton Szandor LaVey