Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.
Interpretation
Life is about uncertainty and the unknown, and true creativity lies in embracing that mystery.
Agnes De Mille emphasizes that living fully involves embracing uncertainty and the unknown. When one becomes overly certain and confident in their understanding, they cease to truly live and create, losing the spontaneity that defines the artistic spirit. The artist's journey is one of continuous exploration and vulnerability, suggesting that taking risks and accepting the potential for failure is essential to both life and artistry.
In practice
In a motivational speech about taking risks in career choices.
Ours is an upbeat, a hurried, hasty beat. It keeps pressing us to go farther, to include everything so that we can savor everything, so that we can know everything, so that we will miss nothing. Partly it's greed, but mainly its curiosity. We just want to experience it. And we do.
No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made. Destiny is made known silently.
The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. Bodies never lie.
Ballet technique never becomes easy, it becomes possible
To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful. This is power, it is glory on earth and it is yours for the taking.
We can't stand silence, because silence induces thinking. And if we thought, we would have to face ourselves.
If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's.
Young people are in a condition like permanent intoxication, because life is sweet and they are growing.
Cause my life is dope, and I do dope sh*t
Most of us enter adult life with great ambitions for how we will start our own ventures, but the harshness of life wears us down. We settle into some job and slowly give in to the illusion that our bosses care about us and our future, that they spend time thinking of our welfare.
The ties that bind us to life are tougher than you imagine, or than any one can who has not felt how roughly they may be pulled without breaking.
I remember nothing of this, no ambulance rides, nothing. Nothing between switching out the bedside lamp and the sudden indignity of rebirth: the slaps, the brightness, the tubing, the speed, the urgent insistence that I be choked back into breathing life. I have felt so sorry for babies ever since.
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