Quotes from Agnes de Mille

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful.

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

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