Ballet Quotes

If spirit is the seed, dance is the water of its evolution.

~ Shah Asad Rizvi

When a dancer performs, melody transforms into a carriage, expressions turn into fuel and spirit experiences a journey to a world where passion attains fulfillment.

~ Shah Asad Rizvi

Limit not to only five, when the divine gifts the supreme sixth; the sense of dance

~ Shah Asad Rizvi

Miss Dearheart gave him a very brief look, and shook her head. There was movement under the table, a small fleshy kind of noise and the drunk suddenly bent forward, colour draining from his face. Probably only he and Moist heard Miss Dearheart purr: ‘What is sticking in your foot is a Mitzy “Pretty Lucretia” four-inch heel, the most dangerous footwear in the world. Considered as pounds per square inch, it’s like being trodden on by a very pointy elephant. Now, I know what you’re thinking: you’re thinking, “Could she press it all the way through to the floor?” And, you know, I’m not sure about that myself. The sole of your boot might give me a bit of trouble, but nothing else will. But that’s not the worrying part. The worrying part is that I was forced practically at knifepoint to take ballet lessons as a child, which means I can kick like a mule; you are sitting in front of me; and I have another shoe . Good, I can see you have worked that out. I’m going to withdraw the heel now.’There was a small ‘pop’ from under the table. With great care the man stood up, turned and, without a backward glance, lurched unsteadily away.‘Can I bother you?’ said Moist. Miss Dearheart nodded, and he sat down, with his legs crossed. ‘He was only a drunk,’ he ventured.‘Yes, men say that sort of thing,’ said Miss Dearheart.

~ Terry Pratchett

He can hum the music in his old man's quivering voice, but he prefers it in his head, where it lives on in violins and reedy winds. If he imagines it in rehearsal he can remember every step of his three-minute solo as if he had danced it only yesterday, but he knows, too, that one time, onstage in Berlin, he had not danced it as he had learned it; this much he knows but cannot recreate, could no recreate it even a moment after he had finished dancing it. While dancing he had felt blind to the stage and audience, deaf to the music. He had let his body do what it needed to do, free to expand and contract in space, to soar and spin. So, accordingly, when he tries to remember the way he danced it on stage, he cannot hear the music or feel his feet or get a sense of the audience. He is embryonic, momentarily cut off from the world around him. The three most important minutes of his life, the ones that determined his fate and future, are the three to which he cannot gain access, ever.

~ Evan Fallenberg

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.

~ Toni Bentley

But it's this one boy, hanging over a barre, sharing his history, who ended up here with me, in this moment, by pure fate. I wonder what it would be like to kiss him.

~ Jessica Calla

This book's like black holes. It really engulfes you whole.

~ Ana Claudia Antunes

That day and night, the bleeding and the screaming, had knocked something askew for Esme, like a picture swinging crooked on a wall. She loved the life she lived with her mother. It was beautiful. It was, she sometimes thought, a sweet emulation of the fairy tales they cherished in their lovely, gold-edged books. They sewed their own clothes from bolts of velvet and silk, ate all their meals as picnics, indoors or out, and danced on the rooftop, cutting passageways through the fog with their bodies. They embroidered tapestries of their own design, wove endless melodies on their violins, charted the course of the moon each month, and went to the theater and the ballet as often as they liked--every night last week to see Swan Lake again and again. Esme herself could dance like a faerie, climb trees like a squirrel, and sit so still in the park that birds would come to perch on her. Her mother had taught her all that, and for years it had been enough. But she wasn't a little girl anymore, and she had begun to catch hints and glints of another world outside her pretty little life, one filled with spice and poetry and strangers.

~ Laini Taylor

Respect your body. Eat well. Dance forever.

~ Eliza Gaynor Minden

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.

~ Eva Ibbotson

If anything at all, perfection is not when there is nothing to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

~ Maria Tallchief

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. SomethingStrangeSpecialIn the stillness of his breath,The waterlike way he moves.He is making a dance.We are making a dance.

~ Stasia Ward Kehoe

A major assumption that underlies this selection is that it is only within work that is progressive, experimental or avant-garde that staid, old-fashioned images and ideas about gender can be challenged and alternatives imagined. I have never seen a ballet performance that has not disappointed me.

~ Ramsay Burt

Every dance you make belongs to you. It is part of your collection. When you think of it like that, you'll want to make your next routine the best you've ever made!

~ Torron-Lee Dewar

I kept wanting to go back on the stage and do it again since I had so much fun and felt so accomplished. It seemed that I had regained a lot of the confidence that I knew I had years before when I performed onstage all the time.

~ Sarah Todd Hammer

It [ballet] projects a fragile kind of strength and a certain inflexible precision.

~ Ayn Rand

It [ballet] is a perfect medium for the expression of spiritual love.

~ Ayn Rand

I made the sympathetic face, and the interested face, and even the impressed face. I did not say, 'In the name of all that is holy, cease this incessant drivel, you pretentious ass.

~ Meg Howrey

You consider me for a moment, perhaps balancing the weight of your fear against the loneliness you will later feel in your room if you do not speak now

~ Guy Mankowski

We act as a conduit for the observers’ unexpressed desires, the silent appreciation they may contain for anything; a lover, a river, a building even

~ Guy Mankowski

There are no good tights, It´s all such a rare sight... Gently, I put one in. Holes are within! They´re only good for a fight.

~ Ana Claudia Antunes

I went to the Performing Arts School and studied classical ballet. That attitude is something that's put into your head. You are never thin enough.

~ Carmen Electra

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.

~ Robert Gottlieb

Wrestling is ballet with violence.

~ Jesse Ventura

I wanted to be a ballet teacher.

~ Jaclyn Smith

In order to dance professionally, you have to start at a young age. No matter what, your muscle structure and your bones have to be groomed from a very young age. Nobody wakes up at 17 and decides to become a ballet dancer.

~ Amanda Schull

Each morning I do my ballet class for one hour; after that, it means one hour less to get ready.

~ Carine Roitfeld

For every dancer, no matter how amazing your career, there's more to life than ballet. Being adored by your audience, it's only part of the story.

~ Darcey Bussell

I actually hated dancing. My mum used to have to bribe me to go by buying me things. A year before I stopped going, I was going to go for an audition with the Royal Ballet. It turned out I was a year too young. Because I was tall, they thought I was older. But before I had the chance to go back, I quit.

~ Katarina Johnson-Thompson

I hated the ballet, but I liked performing. I did 20 shows, and I couldn't get the smile off my face.

~ Ansel Elgort