Quotations and Poems

» “I just put my feet in the air and move them around.”
– Fred Astaire

»  ”It may be possible to do without dancing entirely. Instances have been known of young people passing many, many months successively without being at any ball of any description, and no material injury accrue either to body or mind; but when a beginning is made — when the felicities of rapid motion have once been, though slightly, felt — it must be a very heavy set that does not ask for more.”
– Jane Austen

»  ”I am not the first straight dancer or the last.”
– Mikhail Baryshnikov

»  ”To shake your rump is to be environmentally aware.”
– David Byrne

»  ”There comes a pause, for human strength will not endure to dance without cessation; and everyone must reach the point at length of absolute prostration.”
– Lewis Carroll

»  ”Custom has made dancing sometimes necessary for a young man; therefore mind it while you learn it, that you may learn to do it well, and not be ridiculous, though in a ridiculous act.”
– Lord Chesterfield

»  ”The Twist was a guided missile, launched from the ghetto into the very heart of suburbia. The Twist succeeded, as politics, religion, and law could never do, in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write on the books.”
– Eldridge Cleaver

»  ”How inimitably graceful children are in general before they learn to dance!”
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge

»  ”The only dance masters I could have were Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Walt Whitman and Nietzsche.”
– Isadora Duncan

»  ”The real American type can never be a ballet dancer. The legs are too long, the body too supple and the spirit too free for this school of affected grace and toe walking.”
– Isadora Duncan

»  ”Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.”
– Havelock Ellis

»  ”Dancing begets warmth, which is the parent of wantonness. It is, Sir, the great grandfather of cuckoldom.”
– Henry Fielding

»  ”And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.”
– Kahlil Gibran

»  ”Nothing is more revealing than movement.”
– Martha Graham

»  ”We look at the dance to impart the sensation of living in an affirmation of life, to energize the spectator into keener awareness of the vigor, the mystery, the humor, the variety, and the wonder of life. This is the function of the American dance.”
– Martha Graham

»  ”Great dancers are not great because of their technique; they are great because of their passion.”
– Martha Graham

»  ”And we love to dance — especially that new one called the Civil War Twist. The Northern part of you stands still while the Southern part tries to secede.”
– Dick Gregory

»  ”They seldom looked happy. They passed one another without a word in the elevator, like silent shades in hell, hell-bent on their next look from a handsome stranger. Their next rush from a popper. The next song that turned their bones to jelly and left them all on the dance floor with heads back, eyes nearly closed, in the ecstasy of saints receiving the stigmata.”
– Andrew Holleran

»  ”Dancing is a wonderful training for girls, it’s the first way you learn to guess what a man is going to do before he does it.”
– Christopher Morley

»  ”I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his ”divine service.””
– Friedrich Nietzsche

»  ”We should consider every day lost in which we have not danced at least once.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche

»  ”When we were at school we were taught to sing the songs of the Europeans. How many of us were taught the songs of the Wanyamwezi or of the Wahehe? Many of us have learnt to dance the rumba, or the cha cha, to rock and roll and to twist and even to dance the waltz and foxtrot. But how many of us can dance, or have even heard of the gombe sugu, the mangala, nyang umumi, kiduo, or lele mama?”
– Julius Kambarge Nyerere

»  ”Dancing with abandon, turning a tango into a fertility rite.”
– Marshall Pugh

»  ”A perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.”
– George Bernard Shaw

»  ”On with dance, let joy be unconfined, is my motto; whether there’s any dance to dance or any joy to unconfined.”
– Mark Twain

»  ”Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but she did it backwards and in high heels.”
– Faith Whittlesey

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