56 Quotes by Agnes De Mille

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

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

I want one word on my tombstone – dancer.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.