Quotes from Baker Brownell

Though we live amid promiscuous pressures, spiritual clutter and forgetfulness, we probably still value the integrity of life.

Dance ... is life, or becomes it, in a way that other arts cannot attain. It is not in stone, or words or tones, but in our muscles. It is a formulation of their movements.

But life is not the wax or wick of the candle, it is the burning. It is not the complex nitrates and the carbon compounds in which it sits but their combustion.

Art matures. It is the formal elaboration of activity, complete in its own pattern. It is a cosmos of its own.

Its women are lovely and stubborn, its men angry and ingenious. Is there a land anywhere like southern Illinois?

What life is cannot be photographed or weighed for it is not a substance but an action, and what it does is a better way to know life than to classify its materials. It will do with a marshmallow, for example, about what the campfire on a moonlit night will do.

Dance ... is life, or becomes it, in a way that other arts cannot attain. It is not in stone, or words or tones, but in our muscles. It is a formulation of their movements.

For the world is but a woman with all her mystery and loveliness; and though we may attend her as if we were physician, scientist, business partner, love will go quicker to reality than these and find the inner being of the world.

As an end and finality of life love has its deeper meaning, for it sinks below the surfaces of casual emotion, of feeling, of happiness, to profound realities. Beyond possession, and personality and play--not against them--love penetrates to realms that intuition finds ultimately real. It seeks identity with being; it wants divine approach.

The dance is four-dimensional art in that it moves concretely in both space and time. For the onlooker, it is an art largely of visual space combined with time. But for the dancer, and this is more important, the dance is more a muscular than a visual space rhythm, a muscular time, a muscular movement and balance. Dancing is not animated sculpture, it is kinesthetic.

But Springlike preludes suggest a happy world where the young are philosophers and the old gracefully get out of their way.

Though we live amid promiscuous pressures, spiritual clutter and forgetfulness, we probably still value the integrity of life.

Art matures. It is the formal elaboration of activity, complete in its own pattern. It is a cosmos of its own.