Quotes from Agnes de Mille

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

A good education is usually harmful to a dancer. A good calf is better than a good head.

[T]hen I did the simplest thing in the world. I leaned down... and kissed him. And the world cracked open.

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.

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how…We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.

The truest expression of a people is in its dance and music.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Dance in the body you have.

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

When I dance I am really meditating rather then performing for an audience. I am completely absorbed by the music and the steps I choose to respond to the music.

Friends die one by one, but so, thank God, do enemies.

A good education is usually harmful to a dancer. A good calf is better than a good head.

One of the good things about my having some recognition is that I can do something for the people I think ought to have more and correct some of the matters fate fails to take care of.

Find the passion. It takes great passion and great energy to do anything creative. I would go so far as to say you can't do it without that passion.

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.

Then I did the simplest thing in the world. I leaned down... and kissed him. And the world cracked open.

Who am I?, the artist asks. And he devotes his whole life to finding out.

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.

Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times.