ballet

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

Burdened no more is soul for whom life flows through dance like breath.

Through synergy of intellect, artistry and grace came into existence the blessing of a dancer.

Burdened no more is soul for whom life flows through dance and not breath.

Caution not spirit, let it roam wild; for in that natural state dance embraces divine frequency.

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

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.

Respect your body. Eat well. Dance forever.

True love is like little roses, sweet, fragrant in small doses.

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.