Ballet Quotes

#1. Writing used to be my hobby, but now that it's my job, I have no hobby - except watching TV and laying around the pool reading 'U.S. Weekly.' I have tried many hobbies, such as knitting, Pilates, ballet, yoga, and guitar, but none of them have taken. #Quote by Meg Cabot

#2. I had danced with Janet Jackson and P. Diddy so I had done a bunch of hip hop. Really and truly my roots are in modern and ballet but, professionally, that's not really out there any more, unfortunately, so these artists aren't really having a lot of ballet dancers behind them so I had to learn hip hop really quick. #Quote by Jenna Dewan

#3. For 24 hours a day, for 10 years, all I thought about was being in a band. That's all I did. I had no other social life. I don't want my life to be like that now. I've spent the past 10 years having a real life as well. But Spandau Ballet is such a difficult shadow to outrun. #Quote by Gary Kemp

#4. I could perform ballet in combat boots more gracefully than that, George said. But then, so could an elephant, so that's not really saying much, now is it? #Quote by Jenn McKinlay

#5. Technique is what you fall back on when you run out of inspiration. #Quote by Rudolf Nureyev

#6. He [Gene Kelly] once told me dancing was a man's game, as much of a sport as baseball itself. And he made us believe that. He changed our minds and suddenly, all of America wanted to dance just like Gene Kelly. #Quote by Liza Minnelli

#7. I was called a bookish child. Mother sent me to a ballet teacher in Cincinnati when I was nine years old. I guess I was an awkward child and the family wanted me to be graceful. When I found out I liked to dance and people seemed to like to watch me, I was determined to go places. #Quote by Vera-Ellen

#8. Classical ballet will never die. #Quote by Ninette De Valois

#9. My parents have always given me whatever I wanted. Took me to the ballet, the opera, museum exhibitions. I was always surrounded by art. It's their fault I've become an actress. #Quote by Bar Paly

#10. If a ballet dancer falls over, it's knowing how to get out looking clumsy that counts. #Quote by Ritchie Blackmore

#11. In ballet, I felt that no matter how good I was, if I didn't have the right body type or if I didn't fit a certain mold there was nothing I could do. #Quote by Mary Elizabeth Winstead

#12. I know that dancers, especially ballet dancers, can't do it forever. #Quote by Kelli Berglund

#13. Hippos are the very definition of Disney cute. There is no way you could look at a big, fat, squishy, huggable hippo and not think, "Id she could talk like a human, she would sound just like Jada Pinkett Smith and be oh so sassy." You would totally name her Sassy-baskets, and she would be your tutu-wearing, ballet-dancing, strut-walking pal for life. Just you and Sassy-baskets against the world! #Quote by Cracked.com

#14. The defects born of habit are innumerable. I see every child occupied in some way in disarranging and disfiguring his physique; some displace the ankles through the habit they have contracted of standing on one leg only and playing, as it were, with the other; placing it in a position which though disagreeable and strained, does not fatigue them, because the softness of their tendons and muscles lend themselves to all kinds of movement. #Quote by Jean-Georges Noverre

#15. Muse of the many twinkling feet, whose charms are now extending up from legs to arms. #Quote by Lord Byron

#16. I got started dancing because I knew it was one way to meet girls. #Quote by Gene Kelly

#17. Music and Dancing, not only give great pleasure but have the honour of depending on Mathematics, for they consist in number and in measure.....Therefore, whatever the old doctors may say, to employ oneself at all this is to be a Philosopher and a Mathematician. #Quote by Charles Sorel

#18. If nobody comes to your shows, then it's modern dance. If everybody comes to your shows and no one likes it, is that ballet? I don't know. #Quote by Mark Morris

#19. At Moscow's Bolshoi Ballet Academy, I studied under a brilliant and fiery teacher. This tiny, stuttering old man flew into a rage if his students' white socks failed to reach mid-calf level. Nor could he tolerate floppy hair. We wore hairnets to class - an athletic brigade of short order cooks. #Quote by Sascha Radetsky

#20. ...Your love is evident,' she says. 'But, darling, sometimes the ballet does not love us back. #Quote by Jennifer Longo

#21. A brand-new pair of toe shoes presents itself to us as an enemy with a will of its own that must be tamed. #Quote by Toni Bentley

#22. I wanted to be a ballet teacher. #Quote by Jaclyn Smith

#23. 'The Firebird' just symbolizes a lot for me and my career. It was one of the first really big principal roles that I was ever given an opportunity to dance with American Ballet Theatre, and it was a huge step for the African-American community, I think, within the classical ballet world. #Quote by Misty Copeland

#24. I grew up as a dancer. I did tap, classical ballet, all of that. I did Indian dancing, or Bharata Natyam, classic temple dancing from Madras, originally. My mother always had the great idea that I should learn it. #Quote by Roselee Goldberg

#25. The most essential thing in dance discipline is devotion, the steadfast and willing devotion to the labor that makes the classwork not a gymnastic hour and a half, or at the lowest level, a daily drudgery, but a devotion that allows the classroom discipline to become moments of dancing too ... #Quote by Merce Cunningham

#26. This art, born of genius and good taste, can become beautiful and varied to an infinite degree. #Quote by Jean-Georges Noverre

#27. However, the moral center of New York City, I believe, is the New York City Ballet. #Quote by John Guare

#28. Making the ballet really taught me how to get things moving. Ballet dancers don't stand still. #Quote by Guy Maddin

#29. The woman represents ballet. She is most important, powerful and vital to it. Therefore, she is not "less than" a man. If anything she is "more than" in this field. #Quote by Misty Copeland

#30. As a dancer, I know couples that have stayed married but separated to dance on different continents. Dance in general, but ballet in particular, is such a finite career. You can't do it later in life, and it's something that I think a dancer has to have some selfishness to fulfill. #Quote by Amanda Schull

#31. The idea that ballet is a white art is absurd and shocking, and it's gone on for too long. Nothing would make me happier than having a company that reflects society, to have dancers onstage that people can relate to. #Quote by Benjamin Millepied

#32. She drove me to ballet class ... and she took me to every audition. She'd be proud of me if I was still sitting in that seat or if I was watching from home. She believes in me and that's why this [award] is for her. She's a wonderful mother. #Quote by Elisabeth Moss

#33. At the ballet, you really feel like you're in the presence of something outside the rest of your life. Higher than the rest of your life. #Quote by Robert Caro

#34. Everything seems to be going faster and faster. It's really harder to create something that endures. The New York City Ballet has succeeded in doing that. #Quote by Robert Caro

#35. Sabine gestured to him with the half-eaten crust. "I like him. Not sure why he's wasting his time with the pole dancer, though."
Tod laughed out loud and I groaned. "Sophie takes ballet and jazz. She's not a pole dancer."
"There's more money in pole dancing," Sabine insisted. #Quote by Rachel Vincent

#36. Line cooking done well is a beautiful thing to watch. It's a high-speed collaboration resembling, at its best, ballet or modern dance. #Quote by Anthony Bourdain

#37. you...are...a...frige...with...wings...we...are...freaking...ballet...dancers! #Quote by James Patterson

#38. My mom devised a plan to get me out of the house and gave me the choice between ballet or skating. She knew both of those sports were time-consuming and would keep me busy with hours of practice. #Quote by Ashley Wagner

#39. I didn't grow up on dance class. I was always natural. I've been in the industry since I was eight and I've always had a choreographer since then. But I never really took ballet or anything like that. #Quote by Marques Houston

#40. Afterwards Isabelle often wondered if the moments themselves were greater or the memory of them. At least the memory did not pass, while the moments passed all too fast. Life whizzed by; she no longer had time to recollect it. Her notebooks to this day retain the story of her desperate attempt to hold together her self, her mind, her reason, her order, her morals. #Quote by Toni Bentley

#41. Dancing is forbidden to Christians. Isn't it suggestive that the word ballet comes from the Greek ballo, which is also the origin of diabolos, "devil"?8 #Quote by Peter J. Leithart

#42. When I stopped doing ballet, I started training in the pool. I would do my barre exercises in the water, because that prevents injuries. #Quote by Summer Glau

#43. It takes a lot of money to be a part of the ballet world. Both the training and the supplies are expensive, the shoes, the leotards and the tights. #Quote by Misty Copeland

#44. Ballet in the air ... Twin butterflies until, twice white They Meet, they mate #Quote by Matsuo Basho

#45. I always wanted to be an actor. I was one of those lucky kids - or cursed kids - who always knew what he wanted to do. #Quote by Tim Matheson

#46. It is often said, rather flatly, that Russian ballet was a mix of French, Scandinavian (through the teacher Johansson), and Italian sources - that Russia, through Petipa, absorbed all of these and made them her own. This is certainly true; but what really changed ballet was the way it became entwined with Imperial Russia herself. Serfdom and autocracy, St. Petersburg and the prestige of foreign culture, hierarchy, order, aristocratic ideals and their ongoing tension with more eastern folk forms: all of these things ran into ballet and made it a quintessentially Russian art. #Quote by Jennifer Homans

#47. Ballet for a rainy day Silent film of melting miracle play Dancing out there through my window To the backdrop of a slow descending grey #Quote by Andy Partridge

#48. Ballet aficionados are just sports fans in formal wear. #Quote by S.L. Price

#49. I've always been interested in both writing and music. When I first started getting published, I also worked as rehearsal pianist for the Boston Ballet, touring with them all over the U.S.A. and Europe - I wasn't making enough money from writing to support myself. #Quote by William Sleator

#50. I think it's really important to mix cardio with toning, so I love boxing and then add in Pilates or ballet to keep me long and lean and avoid bulking up. #Quote by Lily Aldridge

#51. I didn't speak a single word of English when I was told that I was one of the lucky students been selected to go to study at the Houston Ballet Academy. I knew I had to study hard in every aspect, in both language and dance, which I did. I put my whole heart and soul into each minute of my day while in America and what an experience those six weeks gave me. #Quote by Li Cunxin

#52. On the other hand, I think it is wonderful for everyone to take ballet classes, at any age. It gives you a discipline, it gives you a place to go. It gives you some control in your life. #Quote by Suzanne Farrell

#53. There's an opera out on the turnpike, there's a ballet being fought out in the alley. #Quote by Bruce Springsteen

#54. I had been a ballet dancer and never could make a living, and just being so excited that I got to, all of a sudden, live as an actor. #Quote by Lea Thompson

#55. Coco Chanel was always doing things with ballet, so it is a tradition clashing fashion and ballet. #Quote by Carine Roitfeld

#56. My mum took me to the ballet at three, and that was the only time I sat still, with jaw open, mesmerised. She brought me home, and I wouldn't stop dancing. #Quote by Emma Rigby

#57. Ballet companies have their ups and downs, just like the rest of us. #Quote by Robert Gottlieb

#58. I liked the structure of ballet. #Quote by Wendy Whelan

#59. Prayer is like practicing the piano or ballet or writing: you have to bring your body for a very long time, in spite of your body's frailties and conflicts and general revolt, and then one day your body is not separate any more. You've in a sense become the piano or the dance or the word or the prayer. The prayer is in your heart. The prayer is your heart. #Quote by Heather King

#60. You increase muscle bulk by training against resistance. For example, weights. And in ballet, this isn't the case. #Quote by Deborah Bull

#61. Figure skating is an unlikely Olympic event but its good television. It's sort of a combination of gymnastics and ballet. A little sexy too which doesn't hurt. #Quote by Andy Rooney

#62. I was a ballet dancer for so long, but when I realized I had reached my limit and that I couldn't go any further I knew I wanted to pursue acting. That's one thing you don't use as a dancer - your voice. And the one thing I use most in my life is my voice so it's wonderful to get to express myself artistically through the biggest instrument I use. #Quote by Zoe Saldana

#63. So many dancers rely on some sort of magic happening on the stage. They never, for various reasons, work full out in rehearsal. That's very uncreative. They don't discover the kinds of things that add up to a remarkable performance. #Quote by Benjamin Harkarvy

#64. So he was frustrated with her. Most people rolled their eyes when they got frustrated. Alaric made dolphins do ballet. #Quote by Alyssa Day

#65. Dancing is a tough career, but I'm glad I spent it at the Royal Ballet. #Quote by Deborah Bull

#66. It's hard to be the one that stands out when, you know, in a ballet company, you're trying to create unison and uniform when you're in a corps de ballet. #Quote by Misty Copeland

#67. Learning ballet is wonderful for children even if they never become dancers. It is wonderful because it teaches discipline, grace, and manners. #Quote by Anna Paskevska

#68. You should have seen me at 14, with braces and glasses, gangly and doing ballet! #Quote by Margot Robbie

#69. I grew up listening to hipster jazz and classical records ... we went and watched ballet and orchestras - lots of cool stuff. Which I'm really grateful for - it's pretty nice being introduced to that when you're little. #Quote by Courtney Barnett

#70. I learned how to communicate and articulate myself from ballet. It's just insane to me, when they don't think of that as a part of our education. #Quote by Misty Copeland

#71. I can always invent movement, and sometimes it can be fitted into the right place, but that is not choreography. It is the music that dictates the whole shape of the work. I do not believe in the permanence of anything in ballet save the purely classical. #Quote by George Balanchine

#72. What's so wonderful about ballet is that it's mind-driven physicality. It's almost a Greek ideal of body, mind, and form. #Quote by Edward Villella

#73. It's time to write our own story. #Quote by Misty Copeland

#74. And, sure enough, saturation begins--the staedy work of seeps and springs. Then, suddenly, cottonwoods and willows spring from the sand, their leaves gyrating into a byzantine mosaic of greens. Birds, frogs, and insects trill out brilliant improvisations--a kind of critter jazz. And as the water gathers substance, there is the ballet of tadpoles and water skeeters across the face of clear ponds. #Quote by Amy Irvine

#75. I'm steel-toed boots in a ballet-slipper world. #Quote by Richard Kadrey

#76. I didn't care how much work it would take, and I didn't see the time invested as a waste or like I was missing out on anything. Ballet became my ultimate passion. #Quote by Misty Copeland

#77. I know you're a chocolate lover. I can always tell. I'm about to temper the chocolate. I have my own method; want to watch?"
"Could I?" Inside my head, a little voice was reminding me that I had to get back to the office, but it was drowned out by the scent of chocolate, which flooded all my senses with a heady froth of cocoa and coffee, passion fruit, cinnamon and clove. I closed my eyes, and for one moment I was back in Aunt Melba's kitchen with Genie.
I opened them to find Kim dancing with a molten river of chocolate. I stood hypnotized by the scent and the grace of her motions, which were more beautiful than any ballet. Moving constantly, she caressed the chocolate like a lover, folding it over and over on a slab of white marble, working it to get the texture right. She stopped to feed me a chocolate sprinkled with salt, which had the fierce flavor of the ocean, and another with the resonant intensity of toasted saffron. One chocolate tasted like rain, another of the desert. I tried tracking the flavors, pulling them apart to see how she had done it, but, like a magician, she had hidden her tricks. Each time I followed the trail, it vanished, and after a while I just gave up and allowed the flavors to seduce me.
Now the scent changed as Kim began to dip fruit into the chocolate: raspberries, blackberries, tiny strawberries that smelled like violets. She put a chocolate-and-caramel-covered slice of peach into my mouth, and the taste of summer was so intense #Quote by Ruth Reichl

#78. A toe shoe is as eccentric as the ballerina who wears it: their marriage is a commitment. #Quote by Toni Bentley

#79. The music industry is so easy compared to the ballet world. #Quote by Vanessa Carlton

#80. Although most informed balletomanes would place artistry above technique, artistry without a strong technique is a flaccid, bloodless thing indeed, whereas technique without much artistry can still dazzle us in the manner of the circus or sports arena translated to a higher plane. Though the perfect blend of the two elements is the consummation devoutly to be wished, the real enemy of good ballet is not the slight preponderance of one or the other but the prevalence of pantomime
the turning of dance into second-rate theater. #Quote by John Simon

#81. Being the only African American at this level in American Ballet Theater, I feel like people are looking at me, and it's my responsibility for me to do whatever I can to provide these opportunities in communities to be able to educate them. #Quote by Misty Copeland

#82. Just as a child, before I ever knew what ballet was, there was something in me where I was always searching for something structured, something that was bigger than me, and something so historical that I could be a part of. I didn't find that until I stepped into the ballet world, and it was overwhelming, the feeling of being a part of something that's bigger than you. #Quote by Misty Copeland

#83. My mum said she remembers me asking her if she'd take me to ballet lessons when I was about two and a half. She said I could barely speak, and yet was asking for ballet lessons. #Quote by Joanne Froggatt

#84. I do take class because I still dance, and yes, I do slip into class with the Royal Ballet from time to time. #Quote by Deborah Bull

#85. I actually was a ballet dancer - I studied ballet from three until 13 - but like very seriously, that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a contemporary ballet dancer. I wanted to go to Juilliard. #Quote by Solange Knowles

#86. I took several years of dance lessons that included ballet, tap and jazz. They helped a great deal with body control, balance, a sense of rhythm, and timing. #Quote by Lynn Swann

#87. Most men suck at communicating, Abby. Like, they seriously suck at it. I've been married for over thirty years and I can say this with great certainty. #Quote by Samantha Chase

#88. Ballet teaches you how to hold yourself. #Quote by Joseph Altuzarra

#89. Ballet might be too formal of a title for the type of dance I do, but I love to dance. I love to draw and paint; I do ceramics and photography. I'm interested in a lot of creative stuff. #Quote by Jeff Bridges

#90. If you have to tell a story without speaking, it's sort of like - I come from a dance background, so it's like a ballet where you have to tell a story with just your body. I think that's really interesting to have to tell a story with just your face and your mannerisms, and I'd like to tap into that world. #Quote by Sami Gayle

#91. When I was a little kid, I took tap and ballet. I've always loved to dance. I'm a rhythm machine. #Quote by Tommy Lee

#92. You dance really well."
"I took ballet lessons."
She tilted her head back to search his face, certain he was joking. "You did not."
"I did. Several of us on the team did. Good for coordination."
Resisting the laugh that bubbled up in her throat, she said, "Somehow I can't picture you in tights and a tutu."
But he did laugh. "We made sure no one with a camera got within miles of the studio. #Quote by Jaci Burton

#93. Every ballet, whether or not successful artistically or with the public, has given me something important. #Quote by Mikhail Baryshnikov

#94. As for the once-revolutionary 'Agon,' after more than half a century, its lessons and revelations have been so absorbed into the language of ballet that it now seems almost conventional. #Quote by Robert Gottlieb

#95. When I was 12, I was doing competitive jazz, tap and ballet in Michigan. The studio put the best dancers together, and I joined that. We always did really, really well in local competitions. #Quote by Jillian Rose Reed

#96. Not very many companies go through Hawaii on their way to anywhere. San Francisco Ballet was the only company I remember, and Bolshoi, coming through Hawaii when I was younger. #Quote by Joan Chen

#97. Physical fears change and shift depending on the role and depending on the mindset I'm in. #Quote by Misty Copeland

#98. Dancing is the body made poetic. #Quote by Ernst Bacon

#99. Ballet is not just my profession, it is my life ... It is horrible for me to think that one day it will all finish. #Quote by Svetlana Zakharova

#100. Do ballet and play football. Sing and dance. Laugh and cry. #Quote by Michael Skolnik

#101. We are constantly revealing ourselves to each other through our movement; learning from and teaching each other without even trying. #Quote by Wendy Whelan

#102. I'm bored stiff by ballet. i can't bear those muscular white legs like unbaked plaited loaves, and I get quite hysterical every time one of the women sticks out her leg at right angles, and the man suddenly grabs it and walks round in a circle as though he were opening a tin. #Quote by Jilly Cooper

#103. To quote a dictum of Simon, what a horse does under compulsion he does blindly, and his performance is no more beautiful than would be that of a ballet-dancer taught by whip and goad. #Quote by Xenophon

#104. Yet for a moment it seemed to him that the men who had dragged marble from Italy and porphyry from Portugal, who had ransacked the jungle for its rarest woods and paid their millions to build this opulent and fantastical theatre, had done so in order that a young girl with loose brown hair should move across its stage, drawing her future from its empty air. #Quote by Eva Ibbotson

#105. I can state that I created a ballet company of which everyone said: St. Petersburg has the greatest ballet in all Europe. #Quote by Marius Petipa

#106. I could have had one life but insteads I had another because of this book my grandmother protected. What a miracle is that? I was taught to love beautiful things. I had a language in which to consider beauty. Later that extended to the opera, to the ballet, to architecture I saw, and even later still I came to realize that what I had seen in the paintings I could see in the fields or a river. I could see it in people. All of that I attribute to this book. #Quote by Ann Patchett

#107. Didn't they understand that for some people the opera, the drama, the ballet, were only boring, and yet a peepshow on Market Street was art? They want to make everything gray and tasteful. Don't they understand how awful good taste seems to people who don't have it? Ha, what do they care about people with bad taste! Nothing. But I do. I love them. They wear cheap perfume and carry transistor radios. They buy plastic dog turds and painted turtles and pennants and signs that say, "I don't swim in your toilet, so please don't pee in my pool!" and they buy smelly popcorn and eat it on the street and go to bad movies and stand here in doorways sneaking nips of whiskey just like I'm doing, and they're all so nice. #Quote by Don Carpenter

#108. The ballet is a purely female thing; it is a woman, a garden of beautiful flowers, and man is the gardener. #Quote by George Balanchine

#109. People come to see beauty, and I dance to give it to them. #Quote by Judith Jamison

#110. Mr. Balanchine was a great gentleman, and he loved his dancers. He was devoted to his company. He came to the ballet every night, and his presence was felt. It was like the whole company was dancing for him. And if he liked you, he trusted you to be yourself. He didn't try to change you and make you into something you were not. #Quote by Patricia McBride

#111. Simplicity itself is the key. Education in ballet, dance, martial arts, etc., is done through poses, or to be more precise, through a countless series of poses. Perfection of movement is achieved through the flow of perfectly rehearsed poses. #Quote by Nicholas Romanov

#112. I think of the New York City Ballet as the Yankees without George Steinbrenner. #Quote by John Guare

#113. I want to be a lawyer, a dancer, an actress, a mother, a wife, a children's author, a distance runner, a poet, a pianist, a pet store owner, an astronaut, an environmental and humanitarian activist, a psychiatrist, a ballet teacher, and the first woman president. #Quote by Rachel Corrie

#114. I never thought of myself as special or particularly good at anything. But once I started ballet, suddenly I had a new identity: prodigy. #Quote by Misty Copeland

#115. I wanted to give people - which is fairly bizarre considering my whole life is contemporary dance really - I wanted to give people a really fulfilling sense that they had seen a white classical ballet - in a very pure form. #Quote by Graeme Murphy

#116. I feel his arm
Lightly
Over me.
He takes one of my outstretched hands.
Draws it beneath my stomach.
"One more time ... "
This is not sex,
Not friendship.
Something
Strange
Special
In the stillness of his breath,
The waterlike way he moves.
He is making a dance.
We are making a dance. #Quote by Stasia Ward Kehoe

#117. Tolstoy may be right about happy and unhappy families, but in ballet, it works the opposite way: All good ballets are different from each other and all bad ones are alike, at least in one crucial respect - they're all empty. #Quote by Robert Gottlieb

#118. I think that ballet is very good for the body. It's very similar to yoga, because you have to hold a position. #Quote by Carine Roitfeld

#119. Poetry that tames language into tight structures and yet manages to move us comes off as a feat, paralleling ballet or athletic talent in harnessing craft to beauty. When poetry is based on a less rigorous, more impressionistic definition of craft, its appeal depends more on whether one happens to be individually constituted to "get it" for various reasons. The audience narrows: poetry becomes more like tai chi than baseball. #Quote by John McWhorter

#120. I had seen the ballet of 'Swan Lake' as a child but it was as an adult, when I saw a production featuring Erik Bruhn, that I first noticed how significant a part the ever-present threat of violence played. This juxtaposition of great beauty and grace with a backdrop of pure evil stayed with me for years. #Quote by Walter Dean Myers

#121. Think of a ballet dancer at the barre. Plie, eleve, battement tendu. She is practicing, because she knows that there is no difference between practice and art. The practice is the art. #Quote by Dani Shapiro

#122. In ballet a complicated story is impossible to tell ... we can't dance synonyms. #Quote by George Balanchine

#123. I started taking ballet lessons when I was three and a half and I still take dance classes. #Quote by Oksana Baiul

#124. And even these ((the common hill fairy, the standard elf of folk-lore) are in danger of being banished into the limbo of forgetfulness by the quite artificial fairy of juvenile literary commerce, with gauzy wing and skirts reminiscent of the ballet. It has always seemed to me extraordinary that literature has been able to create wings where none were before, for our native fairies are as wingless as ourselves. But for such an innovation the Elizabethan poets and playwrights were probably responsible - a topic which we must consider in another chapter. #Quote by Lewis Spence

#125. And in a small house five miles away was a man who held my mud-encrusted charm bracelet out to his wife.
Look what I found at the old industrial park," he said. "A construction guy said they were bulldozing the whole lot. They're afraid of sink holes like that one that swallowed the cars."
His wife poured him some water from the sink as he fingered the tiny bike and the ballet shoe, the flower basket and the thimble. He held out the muddy bracelet as she set down his glass.
This little girl's grown up by now," she said.
Almost. Not quite.
I wish you all a long and happy life. #Quote by Alice Sebold

#126. You have to be able to cut off from the ballet and relax, or you have anxiety dreams at night, worrying about what you're going to dance the next day, going over every little detail. #Quote by Darcey Bussell

#127. It always feels like death. At least at first. Your muscles stretch and burn until they might rip. The bones in your hips threaten to rotate right out of their sockets. Your spine lengthens and twists into impossible shapes. The veins in your arms swell, blood pulsing through them. Your fingers tremble as you try to hold them taut but graceful, just so. Your toes jam into a pretty pink box, battering your feet with constellations of blisters and bruises. But it all looks effortless and beautiful. I hope. Because that's all that really matters. #Quote by Sona Charaipotra

#128. There's nothing like the force and challenge of a new ballet to galvanize everyone involved in bringing it to life. #Quote by Karen Kain

#129. Ballet has really helped me in every acting role. You have to be very disciplined, you have to be able to control your nerves and perform under pressure, and all those things you have to use in acting when you're on film or going for an audition. #Quote by Mia Wasikowska

#130. Just as experience dictates to the ballet teacher the length of time necessary to train his students, so the horse, too, needs time to mature into a great four legged dancer. This fact cannot be obliterated by seeming successes that supposedly prove the opposite. For, even if someone should succeed in training a horse to high school level by the age of eight, this individual occurrence cannot shake the foundations of the classical art of riding, if this dressage horse is completely unsound and unusable by the age of ten. #Quote by Alois Podhajsky

#131. I'd love to look like my mum when I am her age. She taught ballet for years, and my attitude to exercise and fitness has definitely been influenced by her. She's 84 now, and I've watched how well she has aged, and a lot of that is to do with her fantastic posture. #Quote by Sarah Parish

#132. During [Erté]'s childhood St. Petersburg was an elegant centre of theatrical and artistic life. At the same time, under its cultivated sophistication, ominous rumbles could be distinguished. The reign of the tough Alexander III ended in 1894 and his more gentle successor Nicholas was to be the last of the Tsars … St. Petersburg was a very French city. The Franco-Russian Pact of 1892 consolidated military and cultural ties, and later brought Russia into the First World war. Two activities that deeply influenced [Erté], fashion and art, were particularly dominated by France. The brilliant couturier Paul Poiret, for whom Erté was later to work in Paris, visited the city to display his creations. Modern art from abroad, principally French, was beginning to be show in Russia in the early years of the century …

In St. Petersburg there were three Imperial theatres―the Maryinsky, devoted to opera and ballet, the Alexandrinsky, with its lovely classical façade, performing Russian and foreign classical drama, and the Michaelovsky with a French repertoire and company …

It is not surprising that an artistic youth in St. Petersburg in the first decade of this century should have seen his future in the theatre. The theatre, especially opera and ballet, attracted the leading young painters of the day, including Mikhail Vrubel, possibly the greatest Russian painter of the pre-modernistic period. The father of modern theatrical design in Russia was Alexandre Benois, an o #Quote by Charles Spencer

#133. I was serious about ballet for a long time, but my mom got me into tap and jazz and modern and hip-hop, and I was one of those over-lessoned children. #Quote by Greta Gerwig

#134. He dances well to whom Fortune pipes. #Quote by John Ray

#135. The particular ballet was not so important as the fact that I was physically healthy, and capable of getting out there and dancing as often as possible. #Quote by Suzanne Farrell

#136. This is not a pleasant route for many young people to consider. You have to be either hopelessly passionate, or very stupid. #Quote by Twyla Tharp

#137. One of the most beautiful sights in dance is American Ballet Theatre in full flight. #Quote by Clive Barnes

#138. To give you an idea of the size of the Earth, I will tell you that before the invention of electricity it was necessary to maintain, over the whole of six continents, a veritable army of 462, 511 lamplighters for the street lamps. Seen from a slight distance that would make a splendid spectacle. the movements of this army would be regulated like those of the ballet in the opera. First would come the turn of the lamplighters of New Zealand and Australia. Having set their lamps alight, these would go off to sleep. Next, the lamplighters of China and Siberia would enter for their steps in the dance, and then they too would be waved back into the wings. After that would come the turn of the lamplighters of Russia and the Indies; then those of Africa and Europe; then those of South America; then those of North America. And never would they make a mistake in the order of their entry upon the stage. It would be magnificent. #Quote by Antoine De Saint Exupery

#139. It was something I was more interested in myself. When I went to see my sister dance at ballet, I was really into costumes and the arts, and my family was also supportive of whatever me and my sister wanted to do. I would say I pushed myself the most to be into design. #Quote by Christian Siriano

#140. I had rather be a Kitten, and cry mew, Than one of these same Meeter Ballad-mongers: I had rather heare a Brazen Candlestick turn'd, Or a dry Wheele grate on the Axle-tree, And that would set my teeth nothing an edge, Nothing so much, as mincing Poetrie ... #Quote by William Shakespeare

#141. Yes but the point is that you can go to the ballet with me or a baseball game or a concert and wherever is fine. You're like the Swiss army knife friend; you have an attachment for everything. #Quote by Mary Calmes

#142. Respect your body. Eat well. Dance forever. #Quote by Eliza Gaynor Minden

#143. Throughout my childhood, I did a form of Irish dancing that was kind of the precursor to 'Riverdance.' It was a mixture of ballet and Irish dancing that my teacher, Patricia Mulholland, had invented, essentially. It was Irish ballet, and she would create performances based around the myths and legends of Ireland. #Quote by Laura Donnelly

#144. When I feel the joy of receiving a gift my heart nudges me to join creation's ballet, the airy dance of giving and receiving, and getting and giving again. #Quote by Lewis B. Smedes

#145. When I started thinking seriously about learning the rules of narrative, I thought, 'You've learned the rules of dancing from the ballet; what's the matter with learning the laws of theater from the people who know how to do it?' #Quote by Twyla Tharp

#146. Having Alexei Ratmansky create a new Romeo and Juliet for The National Ballet of Canada to mark our 60th anniversary is a dream come true. His aesthetic
steeped in the Russian school but open to contemporary sources
is ideal for this work and for our company, which, with our classical heritage and our passion for the modern, is perfectly suited to his distinctive dance vision. #Quote by Karen Kain

#147. My personal trainer is an ex-dancer so we do a lot of ballet and jazz. #Quote by Rachel Stevens

#148. In the world of my imagination, Esther was still my companion, and her love gave me the strength to go forward and explore all my frontiers.
In the real world, she was pure obsession, sapping my energy, taking up all the available space, and obliging me to make an enormous effort just to continue with my life.
How was it possible that, even after two years, I had still not managed to forget her? I could not bear having to think about it anymore, analyzing all the possibilities, and trying
various ways out: deciding simply to accept the situation, writing a book, practicing yoga, doing some charity work, seeing friends, seducing women, going out to supper, to the cinema (always avoiding adaptations of books, of course, and seeking out films that had been specially written for the screen), to the theater, the ballet, to soccer games. The Zahir always won, though; it was always there, making me think, I wish she was here with me. #Quote by Paulo Coelho

#149. In fact, ballet companies did not exist in the Midwest when I was a child. #Quote by Suzanne Farrell

#150. I skate about 15 to 20 hours a week and also incorporate a lot of off-ice training. I take ballet and Pilates classes and lift weights with my physical therapist when I'm not on the ice. #Quote by Sasha Cohen

#151. So if the dance is five minutes long, make yourself run for perhaps eight minutes. That way, you over-train and the dance will seem easier ... #Quote by Deborah Bull

#152. Before every elementary school classroom had a 'Drop Everything and Read' period, before parents and educators agonized more about children being glued to Call of Duty or getting sucked into the vortex of the Internet, reading as a childhood activity was not always revered. Maybe it was in some families, in some towns, in some magical places that seemed to exist only in stories, but not where I was. Nobody trotted out the kid who read all the time as someone to be admired like the ones who did tennis and ballet and other feats requiring basic coordination.

While those other kids pursued their after-school activities in earnest, I failed at art, gymnastics, ice skating, soccer, and ballet with a lethal mix of inability, fear and boredom. Coerced into any group endeavor, I wished I could just be home already. Rainy days were a godsend because you could curl up on a sofa without being banished into the outdoors with an ominous 'Go play outside.'

Well into adulthood, I would chastise myself over not settling on a hobby - knitting or yoga or swing dancing or crosswords - and just reading instead. The default position. Everyone else had a passion; where was mine? How much happier I would have been to know that reading was itself a passion. Nobody treated it that way, and it didn't occur to me to think otherwise. #Quote by Pamela Paul

#153. I really wanted to make it as a ballet dancer to make my mom proud. But it didn't happen. #Quote by Tracy Anderson

#154. Boxing is my real passion. I can go to ballet, theatre, movies, or other sporting events ... and nothing is like the fights to me. I'm excited by the visual beauty of it. A boxer can look so spectacular by doing a good job. #Quote by LeRoy Neiman

#155. Beauty, like male ballet dancers, makes some men afraid. #Quote by Mordecai Richler

#156. Ballet is like any other art form in that we all start out knowing nothing about it. #Quote by Robert Gottlieb

#157. Here's the truth: I am the female version of a heartbreaker. The one that everyone says is too dedicated to ballet, too self-involved to ever care about anyone else besides herself. I'm the rebel. The bad twin. I am Tally - the loner, the party of one. The love and leave 'em prototype. Heartless. That is me. I have no time for romance, flowers, or relationships. I like one-night stands with plenty of sex and no promises of a future. I like the lies I tell. I'm comfortable in telling them…most of the time. This is me. #Quote by Katherine Owen

#158. I saw a spider-I didn't scream 'cause I can belch the alphabet-Just double dog dare me! And I chose guitar over ballet and I take these suckers down 'cause they just get in my way. Then you look at me kinda like a little sister-You high five your goodbyes and it leaves me nothing but blisters- I don't want to be one of the boys, one of your guys-Just give me a chance to prove to you tonight that I just wanna be one of the girls, pretty in pearls and not one of the boys ... #Quote by Katy Perry

#159. Edgar Degas's famous sculpture, 'Little Dancer Aged Fourteen,' served as my muse for 'The Painted Girls.' I came upon a television documentary on the work, and as someone who held the sculpture in high esteem and who largely considered ballet to be the high-minded pursuit of privileged young girls, I was struck by what I would learn. #Quote by Cathy Marie Buchanan

#160. Ballet will speak for itself. About itself. #Quote by George Balanchine

#161. Hopefully, I'll be a part of ABT, in some way, forever. I think I'll always be a part of ballet and try to push diversity, for as long as I live. #Quote by Misty Copeland

#162. Does the New York City Ballet affect other places? Yeah, it lets people know they should come to New York. #Quote by John Guare

#163. The problem with telling people that they can do anything they want to do is that it is objectively, factually inaccurate. Otherwise the whole world would just be ballet dancers and pop stars. #Quote by David Nicholls

#164. Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.
Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation's OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme wit #Quote by Gerard Nolst Trenité

#165. I trained in every form of dance - started as a tap dancer when I was a kid, then contemporary, ballet, ballroom, everything. Russian, Swedish. #Quote by Nigel Lythgoe

#166. When you are on stage in front of an audience, you want to engage the entire crowd. If a thousand people are in the theater, you need to dance a thousand different ways, not one-thousandth of a way. #Quote by Suzanne Farrell

#167. Whenever I have had a sudden urge to quit dancing, I just remember that moment I had when I was young and remember that dancing is what I want to do. #Quote by Anna Pavlova

#168. Before I knew it, I was racing across the highway. For the first time in my life, I didn't know what to think. #Quote by Sarah Todd Hammer

#169. The life of a dancer is tragically short. What is remarkable about the New York City Ballet is that it makes us forget that. Because it keeps the ballet alive. #Quote by John Guare

#170. The first show I did was 'The Nutcracker' ballet. I was one of the kids who comes out in the beginning. #Quote by Ansel Elgort

#171. There are no taking days off. There are no distractions. If I had that, I physically wouldn't be capable of going onstage and performing live theater. It's extremely demanding. I have to be in ballet class every day. #Quote by Misty Copeland

#172. I remember playing with some friends and being aware that I was acting as I was playing with them - I would think of a character and pretend to be someone else. My parents also took me to ballet school, and there I think I was able to start communicating those feelings or emotions - I danced for so many years. #Quote by Penelope Cruz

#173. Ballet is more than a profession - it is a way of life. #Quote by Margot Fonteyn

#174. I thought I was going to be a ballet dancer for awhile there. I had a good teacher at Interlochen, this arts' academy in Michigan, who taught me the importance of storytelling, and I really responded to that. It seemed like a long shot, but I always play the long odds. #Quote by Benjamin Walker

#175. With both acting and ballet, often you can't just choose when you do it, whereas a painter can go at his own pace. #Quote by Mia Wasikowska

#176. I am trained, and I did do 'The Nutcracker' in its right form, but at the time, they told me I was black and I'd never be in 'Swan Lake.' I went through all those prejudices in the ballet community, and I still emerged wonderfully trained and found my way to Alvin Ailey where there were familiar faces. #Quote by Laurieann Gibson

#177. What more do they want? She asks this seriously, as if there's a real conversion factor between information and lives. Well, strange to say, there is. Written down in the Manual, on file at the War Department. Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as a spectacle, as a diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets. Organic markets, carefully styled "black" by the professionals, spring up everywhere. Scrip, Sterling, Reichsmarks, continue to move, severe as classical ballet, inside their antiseptic marble chambers. But out here, down here among the people, the truer currencies come into being. So, Jews are negotiable. Every bit as negotiable as cigarettes, cunt, or Hersey bars. #Quote by Thomas Pynchon

#178. You? You're no more a detective than I am a ballet dancer," he exclaimed.

"I'd like to see you in tights and a tutu. #Quote by Sara Paretsky

#179. Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Back, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice. #Quote by Charles Bukowski

#180. When movement becomes ecstatic, then this is dance. When the movement is so total there is no ego, then it is dance. #Quote by Rajneesh

#181. I was always nervous about coming back to Australia which was a complete hangover of the days when I left when ballet was not accepted, when I was not accepted, when I was considered a freak for wanting to be a ballet dancer. And, to be 100% honest, I rather dreaded coming back ... #Quote by Robert Helpmann

#182. I'm never going to get married. I'm going to be a ballet-dancer. But don't tell anybody. #Quote by Leo Tolstoy

#183. My mother and my father always had me in ballet and dance, and I sang in a girl's group. #Quote by Jessica White

#184. I never went to a ballet until I was 45 years old. I don't know why. #Quote by Robert Caro

#185. Don't you think you're quite young?'
'I'm twenty-one,' said Brida. 'If I wanted to start learning ballet, I'd be conseidered too old. #Quote by Paulo Coelho

#186. I know that I'll forever be involved in ballet. This is where my life was meant to be, and I don't see myself straying completely away, ever. #Quote by Misty Copeland

#187. I don't force myself to exercise; I find going to gyms really boring. I find it easier to go for a fast walk or a jog in Central Park. I wear sensible shoes because my ballet dancing left me with a bunion on one foot after all the pointe exercises. #Quote by Sarah Brightman

#188. I do everything the man does, only backwards and in high heels! #Quote by Ginger Rogers

#189. I think that every year that the New York City Ballet is alive is worthy of celebration. Because otherwise the terrible thing is just that we take it for granted. #Quote by John Guare

#190. Alex was right in front of the mantel now, bent forward, his nose mere inches from a picture of me.
"Oh,God. Don't look at that!"
It was from the year-end recital of my one and only year of ballet class. I was six: twig legs, a huge gap where my two front teeth had recently been, and a bumblebee costume. Nonna had done her best, but there was only so much she could do with yellow and black spandex and a bee butt. Dad had found one of those headbands with springy antennai attached. I'd loved the antennae. The more enthusiastic my jetes, the more they bounced. Of course, I'd also jeted my flat-chested little self out of the top of my costume so many times that, during the actual recital itself,I'd barely moved at all, victim to the overwhelming modesty of the six-year-old. Now, looking at the little girl I'd been, I wished someone had told her not to worry so much, that within a year, that smooth, skinny, little bare shoulder would have turned into the bane of her existence. That she was absolutely perfect.
"Nice stripes," Alex said casually, straightening up.
That stung. It should't have-it was just a photo-but it did. I don't know what I'd expected him to say about the picture. It wasn't that. But then, I didn't expect the wide grin that spread across his face when he got a good look at mine, either.
"Those," he announced, pointing to a photo of my mulleted dad leaning against the painted hood of his Mustang "are nice stripes. That-" he pointed to the #Quote by Melissa Jensen

#191. The last time I had to make a career decision, I was 17. I could have gone to Ballet Theatre or National Ballet of Canada. There were options. But as I became exposed to the Robbins repertoire, I realized that there was a living genius in the house. #Quote by Damian Woetzel

#192. And then he danced,-all foreigners excel the serious Angels in the eloquence of pantomime;-he danced, I say, right well, with emphasis, and a'so with good sense-a thing in footing indispensable: he danced without theatrical pretence, not like a ballet-master in the van of his drill'd nymphs, but like a gentleman. #Quote by Lord Byron

#193. I trained as a ballet dancer - well, I started when I was two and a half, and was serious about it from when I was eight until I was 18. #Quote by Jessica Brown Findlay

#194. Up until I was about 12, I was a ballet dancer and a basketball player. #Quote by Katherine McNamara

#195. I used to love ballet and I did it really, really intensely. But it came so much about achieving physical perfection, which when I was 14 was a big deal. #Quote by Mia Wasikowska

#196. I feel like I represent every young dancer, and even non-dancer, who felt they were not accepted by the ballet world. I'd like to think that they can see themselves in me. #Quote by Misty Copeland

#197. I feel like people used to leave their homes and go to their local theatre, and they used to watch ballet dancers and musical theatre performers and tap dancers and orchestras and dog acts. You had to leave your home, be in the presence of other people, know how to behave, and enjoy the human being whose beating heart was in front of you. #Quote by Laura Benanti

#198. Noncooks think it's silly to invest two hours' work in two minutes' enjoyment; but if cooking is evanescent, so is the ballet. #Quote by Julia Child

#199. The first good player I watched as a kid was Joe DiMaggio, and that was like ballet. Since then, I played sandlot and college ball and came to understand how difficult it can be. #Quote by Mario Cuomo

#200. I've got no plans to be a ballet dancer at the moment. #Quote by Neil Patrick Harris