Quotes About Performance

It hadn't really occurred to me that the Pike girls would be competing against each other. What if one of them did win the pageant? The other would lose not just to strangers or even friends, but to her own sister. How awful! On the other hand, I was beginning to think that there wasn't much chance that either girl would win, not with banana-peeling and rude Popeye songs.

Myriah and Gabbie jumped up from the table. We know White Christmas, said Myriah. And I'll Be Home for Christmas. Claudia was surprised. They did? What about the simple songs like Jingle Bells or Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer? But the Perkins girls know a lot of long, grown-up songs, and sure enough they knew both of these word for word. They performed them with hand motions and everything.

And now, Myriah went on, as if she and Gabbie were putting on a show. We will perform that oldy but goody, Blue Suede Shoes by Mr. Elvis Presley. Claudia was even more impressed. Apparently, Myriah and Gabbie knew an entire rock and roll song and she didn't. Furthermore, for years, Claudia had thought that the singer's name was Elbow Presley.

I have worked like a dog all my life, honey. Dancing, as Fred Astaire said, is next to ditch-digging. You sweat and you slave and the audience doesn't think you have a brain in your head.

From 1977 to 1987, our average annual return to investors was 46 percent. And even in the middle of the recession, in 1991, we reported a return on equity of more than 32 percent.

Don't learn to do, but learn in doing.

Life is like playing the violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Shakespeare regarded more the series of ideas, than of words; and his language, not being designed for the reader's desk, was all that he desired it to be, if it conveyed his meaning to the audience.

The asides, as you call them, and the soliloquies, in a play, however frequent, are very poor (because unnatural) shifts of bungling authors, to make their performances intelligible to the audience.

To see him act is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.

One can use standard principles and textbooks in educating people for law, medicine, architecture, chemistry or almost any other profession—but not for the theater. For, in most professions, every practitioner uses the same tools and techniques, while the actor's chief instrument is himself. And since no two persons are alike, no universal rule is applicable to any two actors in exactly the same way.

The American actor is very lucky... Because so little is asked of him.

Ik keer me naar de kist. De kist met mijn dood, niet mijn leven. Want mijn leven, dat ben ik, en ik ben eeuwig. Toch kent niemand de waarheid: dat ik voor hen sta als een actrice die na haar laatste applaus het toneel verlaat. Mijn kostuum en mijn masker liggen in de kist, en iedereen denkt dat ik het ben.

centering of whiteness, white tears, the racism of denying racism, hurt feelings, white supremacy performed as hurt feelings.30 She is told off, called out for calling them out, for complaining in the wrong way.

The family is performed by witnessing her being wound up, spinning around.

Life is the greatest show on earth

Then she turns to Midnight and perches delicately on his lowered back. He rises, arches his neck, and carries Marlena from the big top. The rest of the horses follow, once again grouped by color, crowding each other to stay close to their mistress.

The whole thing's illusion, Jacob, and there's nothing wrong with that. It's what people want from us. It's what they expect.

That moment, the music screeched to a halt. There was an ungodly collision of brass, reed, and percussion—trombones and piccolos skidded into cacophony, a tuba farted, and the hollow clang of a cymbal wavered out of the big top, over our heads and into oblivion.

From the most distant prehistory, masked dancing and dramatic art have woven the fabric of group life. Declaiming and performing myths was a way of reinforcing a common worldview, bringing it to embodied life, imprinting it in members' subconscious. That is what the anarchists were doing.

There's something about dancing that's like being stripped naked; you have to be very self-confident to thrash around in public, deliberately attracting attention. I'd never been that way, even without the weight that once kept me in everyone's eyes. Dancers were the lightest and brightest of butterflies, while girls like me stayed low, bellies scraping along the floor, and watched from there.

One of the most important tricks for maximizing your productivity involves matching your mental state to the task.

Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do.

their medals and shoes played percussion