Lincoln Kirstein Quotations

In liberal democracy and anxious anarchy, the traditional classic dance, compact of aristocratic authority and absolute freedom in a necessity of order, has never been so promising as an independent expression as it is today.

She was chronologically in luck. She corresponded to necessity.

He was trained as a dancer, and he had both a dancer's body and a dancer's capacity. He incarnated for me the most appealing and tragic aspects of American lower-class life.

I've always had the idea that we were conducting a military operation. It always seemed to me to be in a state of emergency.

A repertory, a patrimony of ballets, tended as carefully as the collection of 600-year-old bonsai in Tokyo's Imperial Palace conservatory, is not replaced; it is preserved, maintained, refreshed to give rebirth by grafting and seedlings.

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.

Ballet dancers are a self-chosen elite. To survive and surmount years of disciplinary preparation and seasons of even more arduous performance requires rigid determination and almost mindless self-abnegation. One other factor is difficult to predetermine: without a certain admixture of hysteria - sometimes masking as self-obsession, sometimes even counterfeiting incipient madness - performers, at once acrobats, artists, and animals, make little public impression.

If one had to define one essential gift with which a dancer needs to be endowed, there might be a rush of answers. A beautiful body, grace of line, graciousness of spirit, joy in the work, ability to please, unswerving integrity, relentless ambition towards some abstract perfection. Certainly all these factors determine a dancer's character, and every element exists in some combination within the performing artist's presence.

While photography to Cartier-Bresson is constantly an intuitive process, it is never purely instinctive. It is founded on continuous intellection, on ceaseless consideration during all moments previous to, or preparatory for, the pressing. It does not only operate in the blinding flash of a moment seized; it works all the time. The snatched picture merely cuts across the vein of observable incident or accident which is always beating, whether or not the fingers actually press.

The candid camera is the greatest liar in the photographic family.... It is anarchic, naïve, and superficial.

The domain of the ballet dancer is not earth but air.

Transplanting the ballet to the United States is like trying to raise a palm tree in Dakota.