Agnes de Mille Quotes

15 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Agnes de Mille
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.

Agnes de Mille
Ballet technique is arbitrary and very difficult. It never becomes easy; it becomes possible.

Agnes de Mille
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.

Agnes de Mille
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.

Agnes de Mille
Dancing is such a despised and dishonored trade that if you tell a doctor or a lawyer 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.

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

Agnes de Mille
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.

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

Agnes de Mille
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.

Agnes de Mille
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.

Agnes de Mille
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.

Agnes de Mille
When you perform... you are out of yourself — larger and more potent, more beautiful. You are for minutes heroic. This is power. This is glory on earth. And it is yours, nightly.

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

Agnes de Mille