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Quotes by Dancer
"And I just thought, this is what I want to be. And I knew that dancing would be my chosen profession."
"I had a wonderful childhood, coming from Cincinnati, and I think that it was great going into the life that I was going to have, where you have to start young as a dancer."
"That the work involved, the willingness to take chances, the commitment, the opportunity to get on stage and make people happy, was more important than becoming famous, or even what I was dancing."
"I really think that aside from admiring my talent you really admire me as a person and as a woman."
"So many dancers paint. I used to paint. I started again recently. While I was dancing, I was very busy with my career. Start something else that makes use of your creative ability because if you don't you will die inside as a person."
"The older I grow the more I see the influence of my family on my life. I didn't always see it. It was up to our parents to see that we had our education in a town that hadn't yet realized what racial prejudice was but actually knew and practiced it on occasion."
"We don't intend to always keep this necessarily African oriented. Originally I had hoped to have African American Indian of this area, and the Appalachian of this area, but at the same time, just as we have the Haitian room, we will always have room for another exhibit."
"We have a group of friends of the museum who try to raise, if they can, periodically something to help us. Of course, the main thing about a building like this is its upkeep. It needs central heating and it needs central air conditioning."
"Without my husband's costumes I wouldn't have known how to accomplish what I saw in my own mind's eyes for choreography. And then seeing our choreography and knowing the background of it I am sure helped my husband a great deal with what he designed for us."
"I am happy to know that my husband regards me as a woman and a person."
"Black people should have recognition for themselves and their backgrounds and their relationships with other people in the world and thus lose some of their alienation. This museum has certainly stood for that in this town."
"Aside from a few master teachers that we have had over the years, this has been a completely local talent development. But people have started to come now from Chicago, we have a number of students from Chicago and different places of the country and even in the world."
"A creative person has to create. It doesn't really matter what you create. If such a dancer wanted to go out and build the cactus gardens where he could, in Mexico, let him do that, but something that is creative has to go on."
"Sometimes I have given my husband a manuscript to read that has turned out to have fantastic rave reviews and he'll tell me it is no good. Well, if I didn't know him as well as I know him I would be terribly depressed."
"Don't think you are going to go on forever because you are not and begin to plan something that will compensate as you reduce your capacities to leap or turn on this or that or the other, begin thinking of something else."
"With what price we pay for the glory of motherhood."
"We may not all break the Ten Commandments, but we are certainly all capable of it. Within us lurks the breaker of all laws, ready to spring out at the first real opportunity."
"The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter."
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"The finest inheritance you can give to a child is to allow it to make its own way, completely on its own feet."
"So that ends my first experience of matrimony, which I always thought a highly over-rated performance."
"Perhaps he was a bit different from other people, but what really sympathetic person is not a little mad?"
"People don't live nowadays: they get about ten percent out of life."
"It seems to me monstrous that anyone should believe that the jazz rhythm expresses America. Jazz rhythm expresses the primitive savage."
"It has taken me years of struggle, hard work and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence."
"Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract, and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences."
"The dancer's body is simply the luminous manifestation of the soul."
"Haiti itself was also photographed, some of the streets, some of the mountains, rivers, streams, etc. were photographed before talking with me about how I felt about Haiti. Then the camera went to our voodoo temple and saw a serious ceremony, a real ceremony."
"Frequently producers have partners that they never let the public know about."
"I certainly feel my career was a great career because it inspired so many many people, literally hundreds of people to follow a new kind of life and to realize that they could make out and advance their own professional and private and social lives."
"My work has been much more Caribbean and eclectic. I am interested in people, and where they come from happens to have fallen within an area of Africa."
"I don't think Ed Sullivan had anything to do with Carib Song."
"I had certain physical limitations that made me change the choreography for myself or made me more interested in choreography only rather than dancing. I have never been a person who wanted to just dance. I have always been interested in developing for other people."
"You and I are but specks of that rhythmic urge which is Brahma, which is Allah, which is God."
God,
"We can scale the heights of mountains and see the world rayed out before us, but we fail to recognize that which is before us."
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