Agnes de Mille Quotations

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times.

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

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.

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.

Toe dancing is a dandy attention getter, second only to screaming.

If you want to understand a nation, look at its dances and listen to its folk songs - don't pay any attention to its politicians.

Friends die one by one, but so, thank God, do enemies.

We can't stand the silence because silence includes thinking. And if we thought, we would have to face ourselves.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

No white man uses his feet the way an Indian does. He talks to the earth.

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.

Living is a form of not being sure, not know what next or how... The artists never entirely knows.

What have we got here in America that we believe we cannot live without? We have the most varied and imaginative bathrooms in the world, we have kitchens with the most gimmicks, we have houses with every possible electrical gadget to save ourselves all kinds of trouble - all so that we can have leisure. Leisure, leisure, leisure! So that we don't go mad in the leisure, we have color TV. So that there will never, never, be a moment of silence, we have radio and Muzak. We can't stand silence, because silence includes thinking. And if we thought, we would have to face ourselves.

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

Dancing is such a despised and dishonored trade that if you tell a doctor or a laywer you do choreography he'll look at you as if you were a hummingbird. Dancers don't get invited to visit people. It is assumed a boy dancer will run off with the spoons and a girl with the head of the house.

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.

Ballet technique never becomes easy, it becomes possible

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.

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

Dancers aren't made of their technique, but their passion.

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.

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

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

great artists can be uncertain. Of course they are while strugggling to find solutions. Tolstoi's scripts are almost indecipherable. Emily Dickinson provided four or more alternates for every word; Beethoven wrestled with endings to the point of exhaustion; in our day Jerome Robbins and his lack of decision are a byword in the dance profession. But all of these knew very well what they did not want, and what they did not want was the current coin, the well-worn usage. What they wanted was something newly experienced, and therefore unknown and hard to attain.