TERMS STARTING WITH
ballet ::: n. --> An artistic dance performed as a theatrical entertainment, or an interlude, by a number of persons, usually women. Sometimes, a scene accompanied by pantomime and dancing.
The company of persons who perform the ballet.
A light part song, or madrigal, with a fa la burden or chorus, -- most common with the Elizabethan madrigal composers.
A bearing in coats of arms, representing one or more balls, which are denominated bezants, plates, etc., according to color.
TERMS ANYWHERE
ballet ::: n. --> An artistic dance performed as a theatrical entertainment, or an interlude, by a number of persons, usually women. Sometimes, a scene accompanied by pantomime and dancing.
The company of persons who perform the ballet.
A light part song, or madrigal, with a fa la burden or chorus, -- most common with the Elizabethan madrigal composers.
A bearing in coats of arms, representing one or more balls, which are denominated bezants, plates, etc., according to color.
coryphee ::: n. --> A ballet dancer.
danseuse ::: n. --> A professional female dancer; a woman who dances at a public exhibition as in a ballet.
divertissement ::: n. --> A short ballet, or other entertainment, between the acts of a play.
figurante ::: n. fem. --> A female figurant; esp., a ballet girl.
overture ::: --> An opening or aperture; a recess; a recess; a chamber.
Disclosure; discovery; revelation.
A proposal; an offer; a proposition formally submitted for consideration, acceptance, or rejection.
A composition, for a full orchestra, designed as an introduction to an oratorio, opera, or ballet, or as an independent piece; -- called in the latter case a concert overture.
KEYS (10k)
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
23 Misty Copeland
11 George Balanchine
10 Robert Caro
9 John Guare
7 Joan Chen
5 Penelope Cruz
5 Paulo Coelho
5 Anonymous
4 Tana French
4 Suzanne Farrell
4 Sherrilyn Kenyon
4 Robert Helpmann
4 Mikhail Baryshnikov
4 J K Rowling
4 Jason Matthews
4 David Nicholls
4 Carine Roitfeld
4 Benjamin Millepied
4 Amanda Schull
3 Tara Westover
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:Ballet: men wearing pants so tight that you can tell what religion they are. ~ robin-williams, @wisdomtrove 2:The simplest comment on my book came from my ballet teacher. She said, "I wish you hadn't made every line funny. It's so depressing. ~ quentin-crisp, @wisdomtrove 3:It's no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying, & 4:Clearly, the pleasures wines afford are transitory - but so are those of the ballet, or of a musical performance. Wine is inspiring and adds greatly to the joy of living. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 5:I'm enamored with the art world. Anytime you look at anything that's considered artistic, there's a commercial world around it: the ballet, opera, any kind of music. It can't exist without it. ~ steve-martin, @wisdomtrove 6:Another friend began to say, "Well, Quentin has a problem of adjusting himself to society and he... " This sentence was never finished. The ballet teacher expostulated, "I don't agree. Quentin does exactly as he pleases. The rest of us have to adapt ourselves to him." ~ quentin-crisp, @wisdomtrove 7:My life isn’t theories and formulae. It’s part instinct, part common sense. Logic is as good a word as any, and I’ve absorbed what logic I have from everything and everyone… from my mother, from training as a ballet dancer, from Vogue magazine, from the laws of life and health and nature. ~ audrey-hepburn, @wisdomtrove 8: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. ~ lord-byron, @wisdomtrove 9:The available worlds looked pretty grim. They had little to offer him because he had little to offer them. He had been extremely chastened to realize that although he originally came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and Armagnac, he didn't, by himself, know how any of it worked. He couldn't do it. Left to his own devices he couldn't build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it. ~ douglas-adams, @wisdomtrove 10:The ballet. I saw in the fugitive beauty of a dancer's gesture a symbol of life. It was achieved at the cost of unending effort but, with all the forces of gravity against it, a fleeting poise in mid-air, a lovely attitude worthy to be made immortal in a bas-relief, it was lost as soon as it was gained and there remained no more than the memory of an exquisite emotion. So life, lived variously and largely, becomes a work of art only when brought to its beautiful conclusion and is reduced to nothingness in the moment when it arrives at perfection. ~ william-somerset-maugham, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:Ballet is the faeries' baseball ~ Oscar Levant, #NFDB
2:Training for the ballet, Potter? ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
3:Ballet is the fairies' baseball. ~ Oscar Levant, #NFDB
4:Wrestling is ballet with violence. ~ Jesse Ventura, #NFDB
5:Ballet is a riddle of means and ends. ~ Gelsey Kirkland, #NFDB
6:Love for ballet is necessary to survive it, ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
7:Apparently, I have good feet for ballet. ~ Gillian Jacobs, #NFDB
8:Ballet.something pure in this crazy world ~ Misty Copeland, #NFDB
9:Ballet teaches you how to hold yourself. ~ Joseph Altuzarra, #NFDB
10:Football is the ballet of the masses. ~ Dmitri Shostakovich, #NFDB
11:never sit in the first row at the ballet. ~ John D MacDonald, #NFDB
12:Training for the ballet, Potter?" yelled Malfoy. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
13:Ballet will speak for itself. About itself. ~ George Balanchine, #NFDB
14:I came to New York to study ballet and English. ~ Penelope Cruz, #NFDB
15:if ballet were easier, it would be called football. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
16:I'm steel-toed boots in a ballet-slipper world. ~ Richard Kadrey, #NFDB
17:I want to share the ballet world with everyone. ~ Misty Copeland, #NFDB
18:Ballet is a dance executed by the human soul. ~ Alexander Pushkin, #NFDB
19:Bel canto is to opera what pole-vaulting is to ballet. ~ Ned Rorem, #NFDB
20:I do after-school ballet and also hip-hop and jazz. ~ Elle Fanning, #NFDB
21:I thought 'Out of Africa' would be a beautiful ballet. ~ Amy Adams, #NFDB
22:He was a punk, she did ballet. What more can I say. ~ Avril Lavigne, #NFDB
23:Ballet is good, because it makes you stand up tall. ~ Carine Roitfeld, #NFDB
24:I toured the Middle Eastern countries with the ballet. ~ Leslie Caron, #NFDB
25:I still love to see the ballet. And I love to boogie. ~ Alicia Vikander, #NFDB
26:Ballet is more than a profession - it is a way of life. ~ Margot Fonteyn, #NFDB
27:Baseball is a ballet without music. Drama without words. ~ Ernie Harwell, #NFDB
28:I grew up studying ballet; I grew up honing my craft. ~ Janice Dickinson, #NFDB
29:I'd give a month's pay for a thing and ballet slippers ~ Jonathan Maberry, #NFDB
30:All the New York City Ballet does is hit beautiful home runs. ~ John Guare, #NFDB
31:I wanted to be a ballerina. I studied ballet for 19 years. ~ Stella Soleil, #NFDB
32:my sparkly ballet flats still kick your sandals’ ass.” “Dream ~ Linda Kage, #NFDB
33:The best physique I ever had was when I was ballet dancing. ~ Manu Bennett, #NFDB
34:Ballet really taught me so much about the power of movement. ~ Karlie Kloss, #NFDB
35:All she had ahead of her was the cold water, the slow ballet. ~ Lauren Groff, #NFDB
36:Heaven help the American-born boy with a talent for ballet. ~ Camille Paglia, #NFDB
37:I've got no plans to be a ballet dancer at the moment. ~ Neil Patrick Harris, #NFDB
38:Do ballet and play football. Sing and dance. Laugh and cry. ~ Michael Skolnik, #NFDB
39:The music industry is so easy compared to the ballet world. ~ Vanessa Carlton, #NFDB
40:With classical ballet you are literally injuring yourself. ~ Marina Abramovic, #NFDB
41:I used to dance when I was younger - ballet and modern dance. ~ Nastassja Kinski, #NFDB
42:I always wanted to act and sing, but my first love was ballet. ~ Jennifer Ellison, #NFDB
43:Of course I was always mad about the ballet russe, mad about it! ~ Diana Vreeland, #NFDB
44:I deliberately made an effort not to become an expert on the ballet. ~ Robert Caro, #NFDB
45:I never went to a ballet until I was 45 years old. I don't know why. ~ Robert Caro, #NFDB
46:People who leave Washington do so by way of the box... ballet or coffin. ~ Clay Pell, #NFDB
47:Ballet-girls have a bad reputation, which is in most cases well deserved ~ Henry Mayhew, #NFDB
48:I had some ballet training but didn't like it. It was like a game to me. ~ Fred Astaire, #NFDB
49:Ballet is sort of a mystery to me. And I don't want to unravel that mystery. ~ Robert Caro, #NFDB
50:I think that taking ballet is one of the best things a girl can do. Period. ~ Karlie Kloss, #NFDB
51:Since I was a child I've loved going to the opera, theatre and ballet. ~ Christian Lacroix, #NFDB
52:Ballet is such a disciplined craft and it has given me a good grounding. ~ Jennifer Ellison, #NFDB
53:Ballet in the air... Twin butterflies until, twice white They Meet, they mate ~ Matsuo Basho, #NFDB
54:In fact, ballet companies did not exist in the Midwest when I was a child. ~ Suzanne Farrell, #NFDB
55:I think of the New York City Ballet as the Yankees without George Steinbrenner. ~ John Guare, #NFDB
56:Ballet: men wearing pants so tight that you can tell what religion they are. ~ Robin Williams, #NFDB
57:Dance is very, very old. With Louis XIV at Versailles is where ballet started. ~ Neve Campbell, #NFDB
58:the very judicious plan of dividing the two acts of the opera with a ballet, ~ Alexandre Dumas, #NFDB
59:I started with ballet and then my cousin Sarah introduced me to her tap teachers. ~ Adam Garcia, #NFDB
60:However, the moral center of New York City, I believe, is the New York City Ballet. ~ John Guare, #NFDB
61:I take class. I'm always ballet ready. I'm ready to go - got my tights and my shoes. ~ Joan Chen, #NFDB
62:you...are...a...frige...with...wings...we...are...freaking...ballet...dancers! ~ James Patterson, #NFDB
63:Ballet in the air...
Twin butterflies until, twice white
They Meet, they mate ~ Matsuo Bash,#NFDB
64:In ballet a complicated story is impossible to tell. We can't dance synonyms. ~ George Balanchine, #NFDB
65:Ballet is important and significant - yes. But first of all, it is a pleasure. ~ George Balanchine, #NFDB
66:I wanted so badly to study ballet, but it was really all about wearing the tutu. ~ Elle Macpherson, #NFDB
67:The hardest thing that I'll ever do, is ballet. Because you are either good or bad. ~ Elle Fanning, #NFDB
68:Baseball is an art! A drama! A ballet without music! Let us give it a Greek chorus! ~ Deborah Wiles, #NFDB
69:Since my mom is the President of Ballet Hawaii, I'm always in touch with stuff going on. ~ Joan Chen, #NFDB
70:Ballet is like any other art form in that we all start out knowing nothing about it. ~ Robert Gottlieb, #NFDB
71:I’m never going to get married. I’m going to be a ballet-dancer. But don’t tell anybody. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
72:When other little girls wanted to be ballet dancers I kind of wanted to be a vampire. ~ Angelina Jolie, #NFDB
73:I had rather be a kitten and cry mew Than one of these same metre ballet-mongers. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
74:When other little girls wanted to be ballet dancers, I kind of wanted to be a vampire. ~ Angelina Jolie, #NFDB
75:I love going to see the theatre whether it's a Broadway play or a Russian ballet company. ~ Michael Ealy, #NFDB
76:I am both proud and honored to be on the Board of Directors for the Texas Ballet Theater. ~ Janine Turner, #NFDB
77:There's an opera out on the turnpike, there's a ballet being fought out in the alley. ~ Bruce Springsteen, #NFDB
78:I started taking ballet lessons when I was three and a half and I still take dance classes. ~ Oksana Baiul, #NFDB
79:Making the ballet really taught me how to get things moving. Ballet dancers don't stand still. ~ Guy Maddin, #NFDB
80:When I was nine, I started doing ballet. That's when I knew that I was down to keep doing it. ~ Ansel Elgort, #NFDB
81:And what would be great numbers in a Broadway show are now on stage of the New York City Ballet. ~ John Guare, #NFDB
82:If mutual fund directors are independent, then I'm the lead character in the Bolshoi Ballet. ~ Charlie Munger, #NFDB
83:When I was a little kid, I took tap and ballet. I've always loved to dance. I'm a rhythm machine. ~ Tommy Lee, #NFDB
84:As a kid, I had a lot of energy; but the ballet lessons made me calm - this pleased my mother. ~ Penelope Cruz, #NFDB
85:You know, ballet might be too formal of a title for the type of dance I do, but I love to dance. ~ Jeff Bridges, #NFDB
86:I realize how much ballet gave me, and because of ballet, I’m known as a graceful gymnast. ~ Svetlana Boginskaya, #NFDB
87:They fan out across the room, swift and surgical, the steps of this brutal ballet known by heart. ~ Amie Kaufman, #NFDB
88:In a ballet company, you're trying to create unison and uniform when you're in a cour de ballet. ~ Misty Copeland, #NFDB
89:How can men be such lummoxes, such wads of chewing gum on our ballet slippers and still feel so good? ~ Tom Robbins, #NFDB
90:I go to ballet five days a week. I would love to go to a fashion show one day, because I never have. ~ Elle Fanning, #NFDB
91:In the Thirties, when I was in New York, I did the first surrealistic ballet in a show of mine. ~ Vincente Minnelli, #NFDB
92:Coco Chanel was always doing things with ballet, so it is a tradition clashing fashion and ballet. ~ Carine Roitfeld, #NFDB
93:I hated the ballet, but I liked performing. I did 20 shows, and I couldn't get the smile off my face. ~ Ansel Elgort, #NFDB
94:Wear that ridiculous hat that you like. Take up ballet no matter what your contractor buddies say. ~ Johnny B Truant, #NFDB
95:In France, ballet is on TV ... It's on the eight-o'clock news. It's a cool thing to be a dancer. ~ Benjamin Millepied, #NFDB
96:Badminton is like ballet dancing. It requires a lot of control, strength, mind play and measured movement ~ Aamir Khan, #NFDB
97:I love dancing, actually. My mother taught children's dance, ballet, tap, jazz...I'm very flexible. ~ Michael Angarano, #NFDB
98:I'm very flower-like. I love classical music. I go to ballet and I cry. There's nothing so beautiful. ~ Michael Gambon, #NFDB
99:Cricket is first and foremost a dramatic spectacle. It belongs with theatre, ballet, opera and the dance. ~ C L R James, #NFDB
100:Does the New York City Ballet affect other places? Yeah, it lets people know they should come to New York. ~ John Guare, #NFDB
101:Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he'll escape. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
102:She could be striding out of a cloud of shrapnel right now, leaving a ballet of gaped mouths behind. ~ Eva Lesko Natiello, #NFDB
103:I do ballet and pointe work. I also do tap, commercial jazz and technical jazz, freestyle street dancing. ~ Maisie Williams, #NFDB
104:I tell you, the arts - and especially ballet - the discipline is extraordinary. I was extremely impressed. ~ Dwayne Johnson, #NFDB
105:who was glaring at him like a father who had just caught his son looking through brochures for ballet schools. ~ Drew Hayes, #NFDB
106:From the age of four, I loved ballet and tap. I was in the school band, the choir, and all my school plays. ~ Gugu Mbatha Raw, #NFDB
107:I ended up training only for four years before I was accepted into American Ballet Theater in New York City. ~ Misty Copeland, #NFDB
108:Most people think of ballet as children in little tutus. They don't know it is sweat, blood and tears as well! ~ Ronan Keating, #NFDB
109:The ballet is a purely female thing; it is a woman, a garden of beautiful flowers, and man is the gardener. ~ George Balanchine, #NFDB
110:Every ballet, whether or not successful artistically or with the public, has given me something important. ~ Mikhail Baryshnikov, #NFDB
111:I can see why they named that ballet the Nutcracker. It’s gotta hurt having ‘em crushed in something that tight. ~ Mark A Cooper, #NFDB
112:I was a protege; by the age of 10, I was studying with ballet choreographer Anthony Tudor in a class of adults. ~ Judith Jamison, #NFDB
113:When I was very young I wanted to be an opera singer, a ballet dancer... The people I loved were a little different. ~ FKA twigs, #NFDB
114:Ballet was created by trading pain for beauty, she used to say. Eventually, beauty vanished and left only the pain. ~ Neil Clarke, #NFDB
115:grace that her training had made natural for her. Did she ever think of ballet, now? Madame Aleksander wondered. ~ Helen MacInnes, #NFDB
116:Most ballet teachers in the United States are terrible. If they were in medicine, everyone would be poisoned. ~ George Balanchine, #NFDB
117: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 ~ Katy Perry, #NFDB
118:If you looked at my feet, you would know for sure that I used to do ballet. They're completely destroyed and ripped up. ~ Nina Dobrev, #NFDB
119:I believe that I definitely developed into a refined and graceful woman due to ballet. It has shaped me in every way. ~ Misty Copeland, #NFDB
120:You can't drink on an eight hour flight, pass out, and then go onstage... well you can, but then you're Spandau Ballet. ~ Robert Smith, #NFDB
121:I don’t understand anything about the ballet; all I know is that during the intervals the ballerinas stink like horses. ~ Anton Chekhov, #NFDB
122:Mi cerebro es un hervidero, pero cuando me pongo nervioso las ideas se me suceden como en un vertiginoso ballet.”(less) ~ Ernesto Sabato, #NFDB
123:Go figure a crazy, mixed-up country where ballet outsells boxing. I wouldn't be surprised if their wrestling was on the level. ~ Bob Hope, #NFDB
124:Ballet is an incredibly difficult, beautiful art form that takes a lot of training, a lot of time, and a lot of hard work. ~ Sutton Foster, #NFDB
125:I went away when I was 9 to a ballet school. I thought I wanted to be a dancer, but eight years of ballet cured me of that. ~ Juliet Mills, #NFDB
126:So I'm studying ballet every day and really training so people will see me as a ballet dancer, which no one's seen before. ~ Sutton Foster, #NFDB
127:I was a ballet dancer and that kind of bled into musical theater. I was constantly in rehearsal for one thing or another. ~ Jennifer Garner, #NFDB
128:My first ballet class was on a basketball court. I'm in my gym clothes and my socks trying to do this thing called ballet. ~ Misty Copeland, #NFDB
129:The ballet embodies the notes of music. And sometimes you almost feel like you can see the notes dance up there on the stage. ~ Robert Caro, #NFDB
130: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. ~ Sara Paretsky,#NFDB
131:Noncooks think it's silly to invest two hours' work in two minutes' enjoyment; but if cooking is evanescent, so is the ballet. ~ Julia Child, #NFDB
132:I did ballet, jazz and flamenco from when I was five years old. And my professional career started with dancing in musicals. ~ Jennifer Lopez, #NFDB
133:She is a girl in pink tights and ballet slippers, a girl with a heart beating. Her body will move; it will take care of itself. ~ Sari Wilson, #NFDB
134:A lot of people insisted on a wall between modern dance and ballet. I'm beginning to think that walls are very unhealthy things. ~ Twyla Tharp, #NFDB
135:Anyone interested in design must be interested in other fields of expression - theater, ballet, photography, literature, music. ~ Lester Beall, #NFDB
136:I have a ballet barre in my gym. I turn the music up so loud that the walls are pulsating, and I go for it for an hour. ~ Catherine Zeta Jones, #NFDB
137:I think classical ballet dancers dance on pointe because they're simultaneously touching the earth and reaching up to the skies ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
138:We usually spend one hour per week on ballet but Marta Karolyi has us do a lot of compulsory floor in the morning practice. ~ Kristie Phillips, #NFDB
139:Training for the ballet, Potter?’ yelled Malfoy, as Harry was forced to do a stupid kind of twirl in mid-air to dodge the Bludger. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
140:Like Montana Wildhack, Scott dances for a living. But it's called ballet and wardrobe is involved, so somewhow it's more acceptable. ~ Hugh Howey, #NFDB
141:I'm a classical ballet dancer, and at the end of the day I want to be with American Ballet Theater, performing classical ballets. ~ Misty Copeland, #NFDB
142:It is vain for Mr. McCabe to say that a ballet is a part of him. He should be part of a ballet, or else he is only part of a man. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
143:It's a well-known fact. All women are clinically insane, but especially ballet dancers. Psycho. extremely psycho. Trust me. ~ Marisa de los Santos, #NFDB
144:The whole Esther Williams of it all. The ostrich ballet. Like pirouetting feather dusters; their paddle feet in fourth position. ~ Durga Chew Bose, #NFDB
145: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. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
146:The simplest comment on my book came from my ballet teacher. She said, "I wish you hadn't made every line funny. It's so depressing." ~ Quentin Crisp, #NFDB
147:I grew up dancing, and my ballet teacher was literally a drill sergeant; she was so strict and so scary. And it made me a better dancer. ~ Kate Hudson, #NFDB
148:Like the delicate prey that tantalizes the daunting bear towering above, she enjoyed the daring ballet, tempting Him to display His power. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
149:When I stopped doing ballet, I started training in the pool. I would do my barre exercises in the water, because that prevents injuries. ~ Summer Glau, #NFDB
150:You can imagine me as a kid growing up in redneck Texas with ballet shoes, tucking the violin under my arm. I had to fight my way up. ~ Patrick Swayze, #NFDB
151: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. ~ Robert Caro, #NFDB
152: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. ~ Paulo Coelho,#NFDB
153:Sometimes during a ballet I'll look around and see all these rows of intent faces, concentrating on this beautiful thing up on the stage. ~ Robert Caro, #NFDB
154:You...are...a...fridge...with wings,' Fang ground out, punching an Eraser hard with every word. 'We're...freaking...ballet...dancers. ~ James Patterson, #NFDB
155: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. ~ Mark Morris, #NFDB
156:In terms of withstanding incredible amounts of pain - both physical and emotional - I don't think there's any better training than ballet. ~ Julia Jones, #NFDB
157:Ballet is merely a new rationalization of society's instinctive movement towards self-destruction. A dance of death for the Gadarene swine. ~ Eric Ambler, #NFDB
158:Line cooking done well is a beautiful thing to watch. It's a high-speed collaboration resembling, at its best, ballet or modern dance. ~ Anthony Bourdain, #NFDB
159:I love ballet. Ballet is its own being. It has its own vocabulary. I feel as if I am in a different world when I am in the ballet studio. ~ Kiernan Shipka, #NFDB
160:When I was a child, I went to stage school three times a week in the evenings - singing, ballet, tap, modern and acting, and I loved it. ~ Michelle Dockery, #NFDB
161:Ask any ice-skater or ballet dancer or show jumper, anyone who lives by beautiful moving things: nothing takes as much work as effortlessness. ~ Tana French, #NFDB
162:My mom always wanted me be a ballerina, and I was just adamant that I wanted to be a track star. I wanted nothing to do with ballet. ~ Emayatzy E Corinealdi, #NFDB
163:The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations. ~ Jane Jacobs, #NFDB
164:The cat crossed the street daintily, pointing his feet like a ballet dancer, lifting them high as if his feet were too good for the pavement. ~ Vera Caspary, #NFDB
165:Lesbians, homosexuals, masochism, sadism are not perversions. Actually, there are only two perversions: hockey on grass and ballet on ice. ~ Faina Ranevskaya, #NFDB
166:Both costume and fashion are about telling a story, except that in a ballet the story has already been written by the composer or the librettist. ~ Raf Simons, #NFDB
167: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. ~ Misty Copeland, #NFDB
168:Baseball is beautiful....the supreme performing art. It combines in perfect harmony the magnificent features of ballet, drama, art, and ingenuity. ~ Bowie Kuhn, #NFDB
169:It's no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying, 'Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.' By then, pigs will be your style. ~ Quentin Crisp, #NFDB
170: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. ~ Jessica Brown Findlay, #NFDB
171:When you are confronted with an opera, you have to keep an eye on everything: the musicians, the chorus, the ballet, the singers, the staging. ~ Placido Domingo, #NFDB
172:My world was a community ballet school, a marching band, my two sisters and my girlfriends. I played saxophone in the band and was a bit nerdy. ~ Jennifer Garner, #NFDB
173:Ballet is number one, everything else is scheduled in the small windows when I'm not in the studio taking class, rehearsing, on stage or on tour. ~ Misty Copeland, #NFDB
174: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. ~ Misty Copeland, #NFDB
175: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. ~ Misty Copeland, #NFDB
176:One day a man came into the bar and ordered a pint and a pousse-cafe, adding "for our lass" in case I thought he was a ballet dancer or something. ~ Harry Pearson, #NFDB
177:Most dancers have no awareness of how they look; half of them think theyre fat. There is anorexia in the ballet world; there are those things. ~ Benjamin Millepied, #NFDB
178: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. ~ Misty Copeland, #NFDB
179: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, #NFDB
180:I don't feel like my life is that of a superstar! Every day I wake up, I take the train, I go to my ballet class. My everyday life is pretty normal. ~ Misty Copeland, #NFDB
181:New York. It's home to opera, Broadway, museums, the ballet and orchestra - everything that I love. The most real people in the world live there. ~ Kristin Chenoweth, #NFDB
182:Some Russian ballet master woman said there's no culture in America, but if you look you can find interesting stuff in this country, don't you think? ~ Robert Duvall, #NFDB
183:The New York City Ballet is obviously speaking to a whole new generation and bringing it the same wonder and beauty that it brought previous generations ~ Robert Caro, #NFDB
184:I was graceful in the ballet studio, but elsewhere I was always tripping and running into things. And I was constantly spilling food on my clothes. ~ Michaela DePrince, #NFDB
185: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. ~ Robert Caro, #NFDB
186:The worst thing about me is my toes. I've thick joints from wearing pointe ballet shoes - I went to a dance school from the age of 11 and danced every day. ~ Pixie Lott, #NFDB
187:Well, what do you want to know? We only have an hour until Susan and her kids get back from ballet lessons or welding class or wherever the hell they are. ~ Fiona Davis, #NFDB
188:Ballet is the body rising. Ballet is ceremonial and hieratic. Its disdain for the commonplace material world is the source of its authority and glamour. ~ Camille Paglia, #NFDB
189: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. ~ Lily Aldridge, #NFDB
190: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. ~ Lynn Swann, #NFDB
191: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. ~ Mia Wasikowska, #NFDB
192: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. ~ Suzanne Farrell, #NFDB
193:And it is always Easter Sunday at the New York City Ballet. It is always coming back to life. Not even coming back to life - it lives in the constant present. ~ John Guare, #NFDB
194:Ballet Beautiful is really good for me, and it doesn't hurt my back, and it's a way for me to kind of get my heart moving and tone every part of my body. ~ Erin Heatherton, #NFDB
195: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 ~ Peter J Leithart, #NFDB
196: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? ~ Jenn McKinlay, #NFDB
197:I grew up in Honolulu. It's not the ballet cultural mecca by any stretch of the imagination. People are much more familiar with hula than they are with ballet. ~ Joan Chen, #NFDB
198:Well, I took ballet for many, many years, so my whole childhood really revolved around dance class. I grew up around dance; my mother was a dancer. ~ Amy Sherman Palladino, #NFDB
199:I think that I'm so fortunate to have found classical ballet. It completely changed my life and it shaped the person that I am today, on and off the stage. ~ Misty Copeland, #NFDB
200: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. ~ John Guare, #NFDB
201:I could never make a ballet by wrinkling my brow and concentrating. If you set out deliberately to make a masterpiece, how will you ever get it finished? ~ George Balanchine, #NFDB
202:I used to dance for seventeen years -classical ballet, which was very disciplined. I like yoga and Pilates, but I don't have the discipline to go to the gym. ~ Penelope Cruz, #NFDB
203:My mom and dad would take me all over. One night we'd be at the Apollo watching James Brown, and then I'd be at the Joffrey Ballet. It was that kind of scene. ~ Lenny Kravitz, #NFDB
204:I don't really dance for pleasure much." "Uh--so you, uh, usually dance professionally, or what?" Seb asked. "Yeah," said Nick. "The ballet is my passion. ~ Sarah Rees Brennan, #NFDB
205: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. ~ Mary Elizabeth Winstead, #NFDB
206: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. ~ John Guare, #NFDB
207:Somewhere in there the grace of a ballet dancer joins with the strength of an SAS squaddie, the dignity of an ancient kind, the nerve of a bomb disposal officer. ~ Eamon Dunphy, #NFDB
208:He even wrote a ballet about soccer, in which crooked capitalist soccer players face off against clean-living Soviets who perform startling slowmotion gymnastics. ~ M T Anderson, #NFDB
209:We used to chase each other like this. Two kids flirting in a way only a handful of people on Earth could ever match. He with his acrobatics, and me with my ballet. ~ Gail Simone, #NFDB
210:As individuals they were stone, but together they were glass, and their families danced a ballet around them, careful not to ripple the peace they had found. ~ Carrie Hope Fletcher, #NFDB
211:I don't really dance for pleasure much."
"Uh--so you, uh, usually dance professionally, or what?" Seb asked.
"Yeah," said Nick. "The ballet is my passion. ~ Sarah Rees Brennan,#NFDB
212:If we don't take that time (to be romantic), then it's karate, then it's ballet, and then there's Christmas, and then my husband is flying off to tour around the world. ~ Heidi Klum, #NFDB
213:I love ballet and I love dancing...... It's a little boring for me to go to the gym because I'm used to the dancing discipline - It's really hard, but much more fun. ~ Penelope Cruz, #NFDB
214:There might've been wires, but I have this ability to make myself light. Well you know what, in ballet, when you kind of lift yourself here, it's all up in the head. ~ Albert Finney, #NFDB
215: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. ~ Misty Copeland, #NFDB
216:The highest heels I do are six-inch heels - but mostly only dancers can wear them, since they are used to being on point in ballet shoes. Their feet are arched. ~ Christian Louboutin, #NFDB
217:I went to ballet school for nine years, and there was an agent for the whole school who happened to be there visiting one of the performances. She suggested an audition. ~ Sarah Sutton, #NFDB
218:Dancing en pointe, or up on the toes, was not originally part of ballet. It came about in the early 1800s as a way of making the dancers appear lighter and more graceful. The ~ Bart King, #NFDB
219:I attended Professional Children's School in Manhattan because my ballet and modern dance schedules were intensive and had started to interfere with regular school hours. ~ Essence Atkins, #NFDB
220: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, #NFDB
221:Ballet was exactly what I was searching for, but my environment definitely made me the dancer and the person that I am today. And the Hip-Hop culture was a big part of it. ~ Misty Copeland, #NFDB
222:Dad worked in a warehouse when I was little and I didn't see him for three years as he was doing all the overtime God gave him to buy me new ballet shoes, or a new tutu. ~ Jennifer Ellison, #NFDB
223: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. ~ Misty Copeland, #NFDB
224: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. ~ Joan Chen, #NFDB
225:The moment the curtain rose on that first ballet, I knew something wonderful and new had come into my life. I can still see the first scene. The ballet was Divertimento No. 15 ~ Robert Caro, #NFDB
226:Mostly folk music is people with fruity voices trying to keep alive something old and dead. It's all a bit boring, like ballet: a minority thing kept going by a minority group. ~ John Lennon, #NFDB
227:At the time I started in ballet they were dancing 'The Spirit of Champagne' on pointe, in Paris. I thought, 'I don't want to dance the spirit of champagne, I want to drink it! ~ Martha Graham, #NFDB
228:Clearly, the pleasures wines afford are transitory - but so are those of the ballet, or of a musical performance. Wine is inspiring and adds greatly to the joy of living. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte, #NFDB
229:Every girl - and boy, if you so choose - should take some ballet. Because ballet gives you grace. It gives you [the ability] to work with your hands. It's all about your hands. ~ Stevie Nicks, #NFDB
230:Grav laughed, causing his overhanging beer gut to wobble like a birthday jelly. ‘Yeah, I’m starting ballet classes next week. My saggy arse will look good in the tights.’ ‘Now, ~ John Nicholl, #NFDB
231:My Mom is a ballet director, so I had this idea in me that classical training is the best foundation for anything you do, so I wanted to get a classical background and voice. ~ Shuler Hensley, #NFDB
232:Going on stage and doing ballet, for the first time, was even more verification of, "This is what I'm meant to do. This is what I'm going to do. I'm going to make it somehow." ~ Misty Copeland, #NFDB
233:I work out as little as I can for as much gain as I can. Yoga and a little bit of ballet -- only 30 or 40 minutes every other day. I keep supple for myself more than for roles. ~ Julie Andrews, #NFDB
234:If the simple positions of ballet are demonstrated straight on, they seem quite dull and lifeless, but when put on a diagonal, they begin to take on all kinds of possibilities. ~ Lucinda Childs, #NFDB
235:Madame LaFleur would say that you're more of a classical ballet dancer instead of a jazz dancer. But sometimes all you have to do is change costumes to become something different. ~ Karen White, #NFDB
236:On set, the playground for the character, how much it takes varies. Is it like ballet, is it like jazz? The content always lends itself to the form, and it's really not mathematics. ~ Paul Dano, #NFDB
237: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. ~ Xenophon, #NFDB
238:You realize you can get good at something, even though ballet almost felt like you could never be good enough. No matter how hard you worked, it was so hard to be a great dancer. ~ Susanna Hoffs, #NFDB
239: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. ~ Joanne Froggatt, #NFDB
240:I'm so fair that I didn't go in the sun as a child. When all my friends were on the beach, I was going to ballet. The teachers there didn't like you going in the sun, so I never did. ~ Miranda Otto, #NFDB
241: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. ~ Dani Shapiro, #NFDB
242: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. ~ Sasha Cohen, #NFDB
243:I was embarrassed that I even wanted to become an actress because coming from L.A., with two older sisters in the business and a mom who had been a ballet dancer, it was such a cliche. ~ Elizabeth Olsen, #NFDB
244:I know a lot of choreographers prefer to do abstract dance and not be bothered with a story, but even when I'm asked to do classical ballet or a modern piece, I still want to tell a story. ~ Susan Stroman, #NFDB
245: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. ~ Suzanne Farrell, #NFDB
246:The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing well or doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That's actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing. ~ John Green, #NFDB
247:At 35 years of age, I realized that my ballet career wasn't going to last for ever. As a parent of three young children, I had to start to plan my future after dance even though I dreaded about. ~ Li Cunxin, #NFDB
248: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. ~ Mary Calmes, #NFDB
249:I grew up with classical music when I was a ballet dancer. Now when I have to prepare an emotional scene, to cry or whatever, I listen to sonatas. Vivaldi and stuff. It's just beautiful to me. ~ Diane Kruger, #NFDB
250:I'm enamored with the art world. Anytime you look at anything that's considered artistic, there's a commercial world around it: the ballet, opera, any kind of music. It can't exist without it. ~ Steve Martin, #NFDB
251:I was the oldest of the children in my family. I had to do a lot of diaper-changing and lunch-making. I was taking my little sister to ballet, picking up my brother, sort of being a super-nanny. ~ Vin Diesel, #NFDB
252:I had never picked up a basketball before. I went through a grueling audition process. It was almost as if I was learning to walk. It would be like teaching somebody to dance ballet for a role. ~ Sanaa Lathan, #NFDB
253: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. ~ David Nicholls, #NFDB
254:I was completely broke, so I started saying yes to everything. I said yes to a woman who approached me about shooting the Dracula ballet, even though I felt like I was probably going to sabotage it. ~ Guy Maddin, #NFDB
255:My career came together very quickly. I only trained for four years before I became a professional, so I didn't have a lot of time to sit back and be inspired before I took my first ballet class. ~ Misty Copeland, #NFDB
256:At that time there weren’t a lot of little boys taking ballet, so some of the girls had been cast as Party Boys. They were often the ones crying. It seemed that nobody wanted to be a Party Boy. ~ Michaela DePrince, #NFDB
257:There is a randomness to this ballet of death. This is the order of things. This is the secret to understanding the universe. Everything happens in an instant. Normalcy. And then apocalypse. ~ Benjamin Alire S enz, #NFDB
258:Kaito lurched forward, his opponent grabbing him an instant later, and both of them spun around the ring like two clumsy, obese ballet dancers, clawing at each other’s mawashis, trying to get purchase. ~ Mike Wells, #NFDB
259:Ballet found me. I was discovered by a teacher in middle school. I always danced, my whole life. I never had any training, never was exposed to seeing dance, but I always had something inside of me. ~ Misty Copeland, #NFDB
260:When she goes about her kitchen duties, chopping, carving, mixing, whisking, she moves with the grace and precision of a ballet dancer, her fingers plying the food with the dexterity of a croupier. ~ Craig Claiborne, #NFDB
261: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. ~ Solange Knowles, #NFDB
262:I began with dance, doing ballet at 3, then tap, jazz, modern. Then I sang in church choirs, learned how to play clarinet and drums, sang with rock bands and only then did I get into musical theatre. ~ Samantha Barks, #NFDB
263:I didn't care too much for ballet, because you had to be more disciplined, and you sort of looked like everyone else. It required a certain kind of conformity that I didn't feel like I wanted to do. ~ Suzanne Farrell, #NFDB
264:If a boxer ever went as crazy as Nijinsky all the wowsers in the world would be screaming 'punch-drunk.' Well, who hit Nijinsky? And why isn't there a campaign against ballet? It gives girls thick legs ~ A J Liebling, #NFDB
265:God comes to us in theater in the way we communicate with each other, whether it be a symphony orchestra, or a wonderful ballet, or a beautiful painting, or a play. It's a way of expressing our humanity. ~ Julie Harris, #NFDB
266:Sandor Boatly had never guessed that, properly played, baseball consisted of mathematics, geometry, art, philosophy, ballet, and carnival, all intertwined like the mystical ribbons of color in a rainbow. ~ W P Kinsella, #NFDB
267:I've got used to the fact - just about - that whatever I do is going to be compared to the other Beatles. If I took up ballet dancing, my ballet dancing would be compared with Paul (McCartney)'s bowling. ~ John Lennon, #NFDB
268:I can write, because writing—unlike choreography, architecture, or conquering kingdoms—is a thing you can do when you’re lonely and poor, and have no infrastructure, i.e., a ballet troupe or some cannons. ~ Caitlin Moran, #NFDB
269:I will be like Nijinksi, who was taken last year to the Russian ballet, and could not comprehend what spectacle he was viewing. I will be alone, quite alone in myself, indifferent to all the world’s ballets. ~ Andr Breton, #NFDB
270:We are going to set up a branch of the St Petersburg Mariinsky Theatre here [on the Far Easter]. We are also planning to open local branches of the Hermitage Museum and the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
271:Patti Smith was amazing. She talked about politics and sang like a soldier. She was so cool and interesting. She stomped around and spit onstage. Spitting is disgusting, but when Patti spits it looks like ballet. ~ Amy Poehler, #NFDB
272:Ballet is completely unnatural to the body, just being turned out... it's not the way your body is supposed to function, so you actually [...] train your body to be a different structure than you were born with. ~ Neve Campbell, #NFDB
273:Ballet really lends itself to that because there's such a sense of ritual, with wrapping the shoes every day and preparing new shoes for every performance. It's such a process. It's almost religious, in nature. ~ Natalie Portman, #NFDB
274:I grew up learning ballet and then I took up contemporary as I got older. I probably thought I was going to be a ballet dancer when I was younger, but at a certain age, I really was more interested in acting. ~ Elizabeth Debicki, #NFDB
275:Ballet is always about the realm of possibilities, the realm of what the human body can do, what the human spirit can do. And it's about listening, it's about listening to remarkable music and how we respond to that. ~ John Guare, #NFDB
276:Mum, who had been a dancer with a small ballet company before she got married, was full of encouragement. She didn't say, "This is really good, you should do this", She just encouraged us to do whatever we liked. ~ Dannii Minogue, #NFDB
277:I think people are people and, if their feelings are truthful, they can connect. It doesn't matter if you're an aging, 50-something wrestler at the end of his career, or an ambitious, 20-something ballet dancer. ~ Darren Aronofsky, #NFDB
278: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. ~ Roselee Goldberg, #NFDB
279:The awesome silence of the place crept up on her. The spruce and pines, all still laden with snow, spread their limbs in a frozen ballet, breathing a ghostly incense from dark, arid chapels sheltered by their branches. ~ Graham Joyce, #NFDB
280:They were doing the Dying Swan at the ballet. And there was a rumor that some bookmarkers had drifted into town from upstate New York and that they had fixed the bullet. There was a lot of money bet on the swan to live. ~ Woody Allen, #NFDB
281:Swan Lake is the most difficult thing to portray for a female ballet dancer; it really requires such specific qualities of articulation, agility, strength, and the arm work is something that takes a lot of training. ~ Benjamin Millepied, #NFDB
282: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. ~ Benjamin Millepied, #NFDB
283:Coming near him like a ballet dancer she took a leap towards him, and he, frightened by her vehemence, and fearing that she would crash against him, instinctively became absolutely rigid, and she felt herself embracing a statue. ~ Anais Nin, #NFDB
284:Coming near him like a ballet dancer she took a leap towards him, and he, frightened by her vehemence, and fearing that she would crash against him, instinctively became absolutely rigid, and she felt herself embracing a statue. ~ Ana s Nin, #NFDB
285:I had rather be a meteor, single, alone.'
Plus Paris itself was noisome. Even with its glittering bridges and orangeries, even if the birthplace of ballet.
'I had rather been a meteor, than a star in a crowd. ~ Danielle Dutton,#NFDB
286:If you have an idea of what you want to do in your future, you must go at it with almost monastic obsession, be it music, the ballet or just a basic degree. You have to go at it single-mindedly and let nothing get in your way ~ Henry Rollins, #NFDB
287:The real beauty of it - key to my life was playing key chords on a banjo. For somebody else it may be a golf club that mom and dad put in their hands or a baseball or ballet lessons. Real gift to give to me and put it in writing. ~ Vince Gill, #NFDB
288:All my scripts have artistic backgrounds -- ballet, concert hall, opera -- and all the suspects and corpses are cultured, maybe I'll do one about the rare book business in your honor, do you want to be the murderer or the corpse? ~ Helene Hanff, #NFDB
289:Maybe people have no idea how much work is behind a picture. It can seem very effortless but there is a lot of work. It’s exactly like doing ballet. It’s hours and hours but when you go onstage it’s just the pleasure of dancing. ~ Carine Roitfeld, #NFDB
290:I found at a young age that emotions aren't always handled with talking and other emotions. I started ballet, seriously around fourteen, and let me tell you, nothing can give you an emotional reset like a good ballet barre. ~ Michael Adam Hamilton, #NFDB
291:I have a sister who is a dancer and dance teacher. We grew up dancing together. I wanted to become a ballerina when I was a kid, so she and I were always at ballet conservatories and going to school with our hair in buns. ~ Mary Elizabeth Winstead, #NFDB
292:had enough dancers in my life, from exotic to professional ballet, to know that they all moved, even when they thought they were standing still, as if their bodies couldn’t help but make grace out of the noise of everyday life. ~ Laurell K Hamilton, #NFDB
293:I opened the door and stepped down onto something squishy. It was moss, velvety smooth, creating uneven hills of emerald green across the floor of the laundry. I slipped off my silver ballet flats, and my feet sank into the floor
~ Margot Berwin,#NFDB
294:I remember vividly seeing 'Tarzan' and Fred Astaire, the Chaplin films, Fred Astaire musicals, MGM, because of my mother. She was just interested in everything and she took me to opera and ballet, and then ballet got me hooked. ~ Mikhail Baryshnikov, #NFDB
295:I went to the International Ballet competition when I was 15 or 16 and that was the first time I competed. I didn't get very far but it was the first time that I realized what I needed to do to become a dancer. I realized how hard it was. ~ Joan Chen, #NFDB
296:I give myself a Pilates/yoga hybrid mat class almost every day. I also continue to take ballet classes. Both of these practices help me to be aware of my body, my center, and how I move, both with my physical space and my mental space. ~ Amanda Schull, #NFDB
297:Frost is angry because I tried to give him some advice. He was dancing as Frostyev in his Goblinovski Festival Ballet, and there were a few simple ways that he could have improved his style. I was trying to help, but he took it very badly. ~ Daisy Meadows, #NFDB
298:If anyone understood loneliness, the moon would.
Drifting back to the predictable cycles of tadpoles and the ballet of fireflies, Kya burrowed deeper into the wordless wilderness. Nature seemed the only stone that would not slip midstream. ~ Delia Owens,#NFDB
299:Civil servants and priests, soldiers and ballet-dancers, schoolmasters and police constables, Greek museums and Gothic steeples, civil list and services list -- the common seed within which all these fabulous beings slumber in embryo is taxation. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
300:Ballet is like football. I don't understand a footballer's technique but I can see when he's playing brilliantly. People don't like ballet because they think they don't understand it. Actually they do. It's the most primitive form of appeal. ~ Robert Helpmann, #NFDB
301:My father, my uncles, my aunts, from my father's side and my mother's side... they were all professional musicians. My father was a concert master, he took me to a lot of rehearsals, concerts, performances, opera, ballet. For me, that was life. ~ Lalo Schifrin, #NFDB
302: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. ~ Meg Cabot, #NFDB
303: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. ~ Mia Wasikowska, #NFDB
304:You invest into the future, and that's how young people become human in best sense of it - through the great experience of listening a Müller symphony or to see a great play by Tennessee Williams, experience something in a ballet, in a film. ~ Mikhail Baryshnikov, #NFDB
305:Fly fishing is the most beautiful way of trying to catch a fish; not the most efficient, just as ballet is the most beautiful way of moving the body between between two points, not the most direct. Fly fishing is to fishing as ballet is to walking. ~ Howell Raines, #NFDB
306:Some people think that movements, such as the movements in ballet, are a higher cultural expression, whereas some are just dirt. I think it is elitist to think that a trained movement is more acceptable than untrained and possibly unrehearsed movements. ~ Yoko Ono, #NFDB
307:I am very obsessed with ballet now because it is a very difficult sport and a beautiful one because it is not about money. It's not like playing football or tennis - dance has no sponsors, it's just for the beauty. Maybe it is the only last pure sport. ~ Carine Roitfeld, #NFDB
308:I wanted to be a dancer from when I was about nine or something like that and started ballet. I used to really like it and got into it and did it full time for a couple of years. I did a lot of ballet but I traded that in for acting when I was about 15. ~ Mia Wasikowska, #NFDB
309:I actually came to New York when I was 12 and did ballet school for a little while. I was being groomed to be professional, and a lot of the professors and teachers there were drawn to me and thought that I could become a professional ballerina. ~ Mary Elizabeth Winstead, #NFDB
310:I dreamt of becoming a ballet dancer. I studied with the Royal Academy of London for 11 years, and that did not pan out, but my love for being on stage was born there. And then, I actually went to drama school in Paris, France. That's where it first started. ~ Diane Kruger, #NFDB
311: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. ~ George Balanchine, #NFDB
312:The hill is paved with wild wheat. If the conifers and sagebrush are soloists, the wheat field is a corps de ballet, each stem following all the rest in bursts of movement, a million ballerinas bending, one after the other, as great gales dent their golden heads. ~ Tara Westover, #NFDB
313:Nicholas Hytner, who directed Center Stage, is a huge ballet fan. He was completely open, as was Bruce Beresford, to get our perspective. "No, we wouldn't do this. Yes, we would do that. That's not realistic." So, I feel like Center Stage did well in that respect. ~ Amanda Schull, #NFDB
314:I got the part [in Into the Forest], I started taking ballet again to try to regain my strength back. I actually love that it was changed to Crystal Pite's modern dance. And I wouldn't even really call it modern dance because it feels like it's in its own genre. ~ Evan Rachel Wood, #NFDB
315:I went to art school when I was little. I took ballet lessons. I played a little kick ball. I was sort of into everything because I had too much energy and I didn't know where to put it. When I was a preteen, I got into singing, and became really obsessed with it. ~ Amanda Seyfried, #NFDB
316:Another friend began to say, "Well, Quentin has a problem of adjusting himself to society and he..." This sentence was never finished. The ballet teacher expostulated, "I don't agree. Quentin does exactly as he pleases. The rest of us have to adapt ourselves to him." ~ Quentin Crisp, #NFDB
317:On March 28, 1801, his only full-length ballet was premiered, The Creatures of Prometheus. Beethoven also completed one of his most famous and enchanting pieces during this year, his Piano Sonata No. 14, which would come to be known and loved as the Moonlight Sonata. ~ Hourly History, #NFDB
318:The discipline that ballet requires is obsessive. And only the ones who dedicate their whole lives are able to make it. Your toenails fall off and you peel them away and then you're asked to dance again and keep smiling. I wanted to become a professional ballet dancer. ~ Penelope Cruz, #NFDB
319: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. ~ Benjamin Walker, #NFDB
320: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. ~ Gary Kemp, #NFDB
321:What’s it like? Ballet school?”
“Harsh,” he said. “Everyone dances until they collapse. We eat only raw-egg smoothies and wheat protein. Every Friday we have a dance-off and whoever is left standing gets a chocolate bar. Also we have to watch dance movies constantly. ~ Cassandra Clare,#NFDB
322:Mi cerebro es un hervidero, pero cuando me pongo nervioso las ideas se me suceden como en un vertiginoso ballet; a pesar de lo cual, o quizá por eso mismo, he ido acostumbrándome a gobernarlas y ordenarlas rigurosamente; de otro modo creo que no tardaría en volverme loco. ~ Ernesto Sabato, #NFDB
323:My biggest downfall is my inner voice. Growing up as a dancer makes you very judgemental with yourself. You learn to look at yourself in the mirror and you criticise every line in your body. It's never perfect. I grew up with this because I had ballet every day in school. ~ Carmen Electra, #NFDB
324:In ballet, any dancer who asks himself what step comes next must freeze. Any man who takes a sex manual to bed with him invites frigidity. Dancing, sex, writing a novel--all are a living process, quick thought, emotion making yet more quick thought, and so on, cycling round. ~ Ray Bradbury, #NFDB
325:The average parent may, for example, plant an artist or fertilize a ballet dancer and end up with a certified public accountant. We cannot train children along chicken wire to make them grow in the right direction. Tying them to stakes is frowned upon, even in Massachusetts. ~ Ellen Goodman, #NFDB
326:I think my mother secretly hoped that I’d turn into one of those girlie girls. It wasn’t her fault that I firmly resisted any attempts to mould me into an ideal daughter. You can take a girl to ballet lessons as much as you like, but you can’t necessarily make her into a ballerina. ~ Zo Sharp, #NFDB
327: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. ~ Vera Ellen, #NFDB
328:I was used to dancing, but only when someone told you what to do. So in the nightclub I was all over the place, I combined everything. Street dance, modern dance, a bit of jazz and ballet, I was Twyla Tharp, I was Alvin Ailey, I was Michael Jackson. I didn't care, I was free. ~ Madonna Ciccone, #NFDB
329:When I would create a dance, I wouldn't have the luxury that ballet people do when they take a piece of music and impose a dance upon it. What we did in motion pictures was have a song and within that song try to elaborate. My usual method was to do what a writer does: get a plot. ~ Gene Kelly, #NFDB
330: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. ~ Robert Helpmann, #NFDB
331: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. ~ Amanda Schull, #NFDB
332:Capoeira was designed to look like a dance, and it's actually an incredibly effective means of fighting. Fighting is dancing. Look at a great boxing match, and it's a dancing. That's what's great about the choreography that goes on here. It's a delicate ballet with a fist in the face. ~ David Lyons, #NFDB
333:It's hard with ballet because your aesthetic really is important. It's different from acting and from film. Nobody wants to watch somebody who is sickly thin. And it's interesting because I have danced with people who are ill, have eating disorders, and a light goes off within them. ~ Amanda Schull, #NFDB
334:Yo, dumbass. What do you think she’d be doing with them? Giving them ballet lessons? (Darling) Tell me again why I can’t kill him? (Hauk) You’re afraid of handling explosives. (Nykyrian) One day I’m going to get over that and when I do…(Hauk) I’ll wisely stop annoying you. (Darling) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon, #NFDB
335:My life isn’t theories and formulae. It’s part instinct, part common sense. Logic is as good a word as any, and I’ve absorbed what logic I have from everything and everyone… from my mother, from training as a ballet dancer, from Vogue magazine, from the laws of life and health and nature. ~ Audrey Hepburn, #NFDB
336:I wasn't a ballet baby. My first dance class was in an outdoor pavilion when I was three. It was called 'creative movement.' The teacher gave us chiffon scarves in beautiful colors. She turned on some music and said, 'Now go dance.' So for me, dance has always been about self-expression. ~ Carrie Ann Inaba, #NFDB
337:The very essence of ballet is poetic, deriving from dreams rather than from reality. About the only reason for its existence is to enable us to remain in the world of fantasy and escape from the people we rub shoulders with in the street. Ballets are the dreams of poets taken seriously. ~ Th ophile Gautier, #NFDB
338:When I was young, I couldn't think about ballet because I had to focus on my own field. But once you secure your own performance area, you can indulge yourself in different territories. Fashion is one. And ballet is absolutely a fantasy, because it deals with the bodies in a different way. ~ Marina Abramovic, #NFDB
339:Over decades that seem but a moment in time, lines of scarlet figures shuttled among the sorghum stalks to weave a vast human tapestry. They killed, they looted, and they defended their country in a valiant, stirring ballet that makes us unfilial descendants who now occupy the land pale by comparison. ~ Mo Yan, #NFDB
340:Russian culture is multifaceted and diverse. So if you want to understand, to feel Russia, then of course you need to read books, Tolstoy and Chekhov and Gogol and others. Listen to music. Tchaikovsky. Watch our classical ballet. But the most important thing is that you need to talk with people. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
341:Yo, dumbass. What do you think she’d be doing with them? Giving them ballet lessons? (Darling)
Tell me again why I can’t kill him? (Hauk)
You’re afraid of handling explosives. (Nykyrian)
One day I’m going to get over that and when I do…(Hauk)
I’ll wisely stop annoying you. (Darling) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon,#NFDB
342:all up to her. She was the one dealing with everything. The late-night accidents in bed. The homework. Proper nutrition. Cleaning the house, doing the laundry. Rushing to t-ball games and ballet classes. Everything, all of it, on her own, on top of a fifty-hour workweek. She fumed at Brian for being ~ Ernie Lindsey, #NFDB
343:Wrestling used to be interesting. There was a bit of sham involved, of course, but there was some real wrestling involved. They're just characters now. It's unrecognizable. There's no fighting in American bloody wrestling. They just yell at each other and jump around like overweight ballet dancers. ~ Shane MacGowan, #NFDB
344:In the period from 1945 to 1960, the number of orchestras in the country doubled, book sales rose some 250 percent, and art museums opened in most major cities. Ballet was quick to catch up: between 1958 and 1969 the number of ballet companies nationwide with more than twenty members nearly tripled. ~ Jennifer Homans, #NFDB
345:She doesn't care what it means to be a dancer. What sacrifices it takes. And she knows that Mr. K will easily let me go. That I'm nothing. I can be replaced. Girls are a dime a dozen in ballet-not like the boys who are treated like princes. Another girl will be plucked from some audition somewhere. ~ Sona Charaipotra, #NFDB
346:I will say a lot of dancers do such beautiful things for their body and then they smoke a cigarette. I've never been a smoker, but I realized after taking yoga . . . in ballet you're not encouraged to do a lot of breathing. I think in a weird way, a lot of dancers find relief in actually breathing. ~ Elizabeth Berkley, #NFDB
347:How long the party lasted Forrester did not know. He remembered a long harangue in which the drunken ballet dancer was trying to explain to him that the accent was Martian, not German; something to do with six-hundred-millibar oxyhelium air, which got them out of the habit of hearing certain frequencies. ~ Frederik Pohl, #NFDB
348:On the line beside Describe your family, I wrote, "Bad."
What is your favorite subject in school? "None."
List three of your favorite activities. "Soccer, ballet, and fighting."
Two of those favorite activities were lies but one of them was the truth.
I am fond of fighting. ~ Barbara O Connor,#NFDB
349:So...I'm larking through the Baby Gap, looking at tiny capri pants and sweaters that cost more than ... I don't know,more than they should. And I get totally sucked in by this ridiculous, tiny fur coat. The kind of coat a baby might need to go to the ballet. In Moscow. In 1918. To match her tiny pearls. ~ Rainbow Rowell, #NFDB
350: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. ~ Walter Dean Myers, #NFDB
351:Notes for a ballet, The Spell: ... Suddenly Sigmund hears the flutter of wings, and a group of wild swans flies across the moon ... Sigmund is astounded to see that their leader is part swan and part woman - unfortunately, divided lengthwise. She enchants Sigmund, who is careful not to make any poultry jokes. ~ Woody Allen, #NFDB
352:Ballet is the repetitive training of the body for the purpose of executing steps in traditional fashion. It is tied to and bound by the past. It is a disciplined beauty consciously preserved in the image of the old days in societies that were class-conscious and appreciative of elitist physical expertise. ~ Shirley MacLaine, #NFDB
353:Ballet dancing is arduous, strenuous activity. Students are engaged in physical training that rivals the training Olympic athletes undergo. At the same time, they strive for physical perfection not for the prowess alone but as a way of achieving the means necessary to express the pure nature of their art. ~ George Balanchine, #NFDB
354:Nate’s halo was faded and waning. “Is something bothering you?” she asked. Nate buried his head in his tablet. “What?” he said. “You’re acting strangely.” She wondered if she would ever tell him about the colors. She decided to try to distract him. “You should try stretching, to relax, like we did in ballet. ~ Jason Matthews, #NFDB
355: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. ~ Lord Byron, #NFDB
356:Briony knew her only reasonable choice then would be to run away, to live under hedges, eat berries and speak to no one, and be found by a bearded woodsman one winter's dawn, curled up at the base of a giant oak, beautiful and dead, and barefoot, or perhaps wearing the ballet pumps with the pink ribbon straps . . . ~ Ian McEwan, #NFDB
357:I didn't really know anything about Margot Fonteyn. I'd never really been a ballet child, so I had no idea what an incredibly huge icon she was, not just in terms of a creative icon - she was also a style icon. I had no idea she was up there with Audrey Hepburn and Jackie Onassis in terms of that kind of image. ~ Anne Marie Duff, #NFDB
358: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. ~ Jenna Dewan, #NFDB
359:Eat, drink, smoke, swim in the ocean, play tennis, golf, and poker, watch polo, read trash, listen to pop singers, occasionally attend the theatre, opera, ballet, charity bashes, and private shindigs, buy clothes and trinkets, write to old friends, party with new friends, and sleep. I think that about covers it. ~ Lawrence Sanders, #NFDB
360:I was a daughterless mother. I had nowhere to put the things a mother places on her daughter. The nail polish I used to paint our toenails hardened. Our favorite videos gathered dust. Her small apron was in a box in the attic. Her shoes - the sparkly ones, the leopard rain boots, the ballet slippers - stood in a corner. ~ Ann Hood, #NFDB
361:I asked for Nigel Manderson. The bartender didn’t blink. I knew this was useless. I turned and shouted out, “Which one of you is Nigel Manderson?” A man wearing a baroque ruffled white shirt with squared-off shoulders raised his glass. He looked like he’d just walked out of a Spandau Ballet video. “Cheers, mate.” The ~ Harlan Coben, #NFDB
362:She loved hockey. Loved the speed, the agility. The fights. The men. Brawny, sweaty, messy. They let their hair grown, though no one would ever accuse them of being feminine, not with perpetual five o'clock shadow and bulging muscles. They skated with the grace of ballet dancers and fought at the drop of a glove. ~ Stephanie Julian, #NFDB
363:[...] all expressions of creativity have a structure at work within them, most particularly those who adhere to a classical form. All romances are the same in the same way that all choreographed ballets are the same. Each ballet is a written sequence of the same steps, but each performance is remarquably different [...] ~ Sarah Wendell, #NFDB
364:Listening to her banter with Armin was like standing between two ballet dancers in a gunfight. They circled each other elegantly, feinting, pirouetting, setting up the fatal shot, and Blythe was usually the one to fire it point-blank to Armin’s chest. He accepted his wounds with a gentleman’s grace, and the dance resumed. ~ Leah Raeder, #NFDB
365:I have always loved fashion because it's a great way to express your mood. And I'm definitely a shoe lover. The right pair of shoes can change the feel of an outfit, and even change how a woman feels about herself. A woman can wear confidence on her feet with a high stiletto, or slip into weekend comfort with a soft ballet flat. ~ Fergie, #NFDB
366:I was a ballet dancer. I did other kinds of dance but ballet was my great love. But then it became clear, when I was 12, that my body wasn't going to be right. That's always a heartbreaking moment because there's nothing you can do about that. Your body is just not right. You don't have enough turnout. You're not built properly. ~ Greta Gerwig, #NFDB
367:People often say to me - how clever you are! How brilliant to be able to go from ballet to theatre as you do. I answer that it is not clever at all. It is the gift of looking at oneself coolly, of calculating the future objectively. I could see the danger signals as far as ballet was concerned before anyone else did, that's all. ~ Robert Helpmann, #NFDB
368:Dreaming at the Ballet"
The truth is, goddesses are lousy in bed.
They will do anything it’s true.
And the skin is beautifully cared for.
But they have no sense of it. They are
all manner and amazing technique.
I lie with them thinking of your
foolish excess, of you panting
and sweating, and your eyes after. ~ Jack Gilbert,#NFDB
369:The minute we don't finance the arts, the accountants, attorneys and politicians keep taking the cream of money off the top and it doesn't trickle down unless all of society understands that we must support the arts, whether it's ballet, opera, fashion. Fashion is like opera, is like ballet, is like theatre. It's a visual theatre. ~ Carmen Dell Orefice, #NFDB
370: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. ~ Laura Benanti, #NFDB
371: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. I'm saying that and someone's going to be born tomorrow who decides to do that and I'm going to have my foot in my mouth. ~ Joan Chen, #NFDB
372:I went to Indiana University for college for a couple of years where I double majored in dance and journalism, and after my sophomore year there, I went to the San Francisco Ballet school for the summer, but then they offered me a scholarship to stay for the year. That's where I danced after the year they offered me a contract with the company. ~ Joan Chen, #NFDB
373:I began dancing when I was 7 years old. I was told that I had the perfect ballet dancers body and had these crazy high arches in my feet that resulted in an amazing point. Ballet was very disciplined and, frankly, a little boring, so I eventually transitioned to gymnastics. I loved that, although I never reached a competitive level. ~ Catherine Mary Stewart, #NFDB
374:Like most citizens of popular and international urban centres, I don't take advantage of the cultural opportunities. Perhaps this comes from growing up in suburbia. Home is where you eat, sleep, read, watch television and ignore your parents. It is not where you go to the ballet and then attend a heated panel discussion about it afterwards. ~ Sloane Crosley, #NFDB
375:She was wearing a wonderful Claudia outfit — a purple-and-white striped bodysuit under a gray jumper-thing. The legs of the bodysuit stretched all the way to her ankles, but she was wearing purple push-down socks anyway. Around her middle was a wide purple belt with a buckle in the shape of a telephone. And on her feet were black ballet slippers. ~ Ann M Martin, #NFDB
376:That kind of friendship doesn't just materialize at the end of the rainbow one morning in a soft-focus Hollywood haze. For it to last this long, and at such close quarters, some serious work had gone into it. Ask any ice-skater or ballet dancer or show jumper, anyone who lives by beautiful moving things: nothing takes as much work as effortlessness. ~ Tana French, #NFDB
377:Philanthropists and donors traditionally haven't been sufficiently interested in women's rights abroad, giving money instead to higher brow causes such as the ballet or art museums. There could be a powerful international women's rights movement if only philanthropists would donate as much to real women as to paintings and sculptures of women. ~ Nicholas D Kristof, #NFDB
378:If you don't feel challenged, it's because you're not doing enough. Ballet should never feel comfortable. Comfortable is lazy! If you're comfortable when you dance, you're not pushing yourself hard enough. 100 % is not enough. You have to give 200%. One tendu takes years of hard work and will never be perfect. Everything in ballet is a challenge. ~ George Balanchine, #NFDB
379:An Odonian undertook monogamy just as he might undertake a joint enterprise in production, a ballet or a soap-works. Partnership was a voluntarily constituted federation like any other. So long as it worked, it worked, and if it didn't work it stopped being. It was not an institution but a function. It had no sanction but that of private conscience. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
380:The hill is paved with wild wheat. If the conifers and sagebrush are soloists, the wheat field is a corps de ballet, each stem following all the rest in bursts of movement, a million ballerinas bending, one after the other, as great gales dent their golden heads. The shape of that dent lasts only a moment, and is as close as anyone gets to seeing wind. ~ Tara Westover, #NFDB
381: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. ~ Li Cunxin, #NFDB
382:the only plan I’ve come up with is writing. I can write, because writing—unlike choreography, architecture, or conquering kingdoms—is a thing you can do when you’re lonely and poor, and have no infrastructure, i.e., a ballet troupe or some cannons. Poor people can write. It’s one of the few things poverty, and lack of connections, cannot stop you doing. ~ Caitlin Moran, #NFDB
383:Mientras volvía a mi casa profundamente deprimido, trataba de pensar con claridad. Mi cerebro es un hervidero, pero cuando me pongo nervioso las ideas se me suceden como en un vertiginoso ballet; a pesar de lo cual, o quizá por eso mismo, he ido acostumbrándome a gobernarlas y ordenarlas rigurosamente; de otro modo creo que no tardaría en volverme loco. ~ Ernesto Sabato, #NFDB
384:Families are weird. You'd think that people who live and eat and sleep in the same place would always have a lot in common. But sometimes they don't have anything in common AT ALL. You can have a brother who really likes ballet and a sister who thinks it's girlie. You could probably have Darth Vader and Mickey Mouse in the same family; they're that weird. ~ Emma Thompson, #NFDB
385: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. ~ Heather King, #NFDB
386:She had what the Councillor knew, in the technical language of the ballet, as "ballon", a lightness that is not only the negation of weight, but which actually seems to carry upwards and make for flight, and which is rarely found in thin dancers - as if the matter itself had here become lighter than air, so that the more there is of it the better it works. ~ Karen Blixen, #NFDB
387:She’d inherited Eli’s old phone and often got texts meant for him. One night, that senior girl who always talked about ballet and wore leotards and jeans to school texted twenty-four times. One of the texts had said—Deenie never forgot it—MY PUSSY ACHES FOR U. It had to have been the worst thing she’d ever read. She’d read it over and over before deleting it. ~ Megan Abbott, #NFDB
388:So far, the only plan I’ve come up with is writing. I can write, because writing—unlike choreography, architecture, or conquering kingdoms—is a thing you can do when you’re lonely and poor, and have no infrastructure, i.e., a ballet troupe or some cannons. Poor people can write. It’s one of the few things poverty, and lack of connections, cannot stop you doing. ~ Caitlin Moran, #NFDB
389:Giiiirl," Benny said, fanning himself with the appointment book. "I'm as gay as Todrick's ballet shoes and even I have a semi from that." I exhaled a long, deep breath. "Oh, honey, you got a case of the blue tubes right now, don't you?" he asked, looking sympathetic. "If it's any consolation, it's only one more day until that man can be all up in your lady cave. ~ Jessica Gadziala, #NFDB
390:The first flakes of snow began to fall as she got to the back entrance, dancing lightly in the air. She stopped to watch their intricate ballet. Now this, this was real. Abundant water vapor causing small particles of ice, too heavy to be contained in the clouds, to fall to the earth. Science. Incontrovertible evidence. But at one time, it must have seemed like magic. ~ J T Ellison, #NFDB
391:Certaines relations harmonieuses se créent et durent grâce à un système complexe de menues contre-vérités, de renoncements, une espèce de ballet complice d'attitudes et de postures qui peut se résumer dans un proverbe jamais assez cité, ou plutôt une sentence, cette désignation lui convenant beaucoup mieux, Toi et moi nous savons, mais tais-toi et je me tairai. (ch. 5) ~ Jos Saramago, #NFDB
392:I've usually never felt comfortable shooting until things were kind of claustrophobic, but ballet dancers need a lot of space, so the sets that I designed had to be big. Normally, I'd design a kitchen that was half the size of a normal kitchen, just to make everything feel kind of womb-like, but the kitchen in a ballet would have to be like 100 feet wide and just as long. ~ Guy Maddin, #NFDB
393:I have never known anyone with less money and less visible means of getting hold of it. He had slept around everywhere, from the floors of friends’ studios, to the Metro. There were days when he had literally no money at all, and after a string of such days he would go to the blood bank and sell his blood. More often than not he spent this money on tickets to the ballet. ~ Elaine Dundy, #NFDB
394: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. ~ Misty Copeland, #NFDB
395:I wish I could show you how an interrogation can have its own beauty, shining and cruel as that of a bullfight; how in defiance of the crudest topic or the most moronic suspect it keeps inviolate its own taut, honed grace, its own irresistible and blood-stirring rhythms; how the great pairs of detectives know each other’s every thought as surely as lifelong ballet partners ~ Tana French, #NFDB
396:She had to defend him in order to defend herself. That was why people were so prickly about their partners, even their ex-partners. To admit that Duncan wasn't up to much was to own up publicly to the terrible waste of time, and terrible lapses in judgment and taste. She had stuck up for Spandau Ballet in just the same way at school, even after she had stopped liking them. ~ Nick Hornby, #NFDB
397:There were some parts of the film [Swiss Army Man] that the Daniels [Kwan and Scheinert] really wanted to look as elegant as a piece of ballet. As Hank and Manny go on in the story, they get better and better at being with each other and more and more adept - Hank knows more and more what Manny's going to need at any given point, and having that choreography helps a bit. ~ Daniel Radcliffe, #NFDB
398:…* to learn that money makes life smooth in some ways, and to feel how tight and threadbare life is if you have too little. * to despise money, which is a farce, mere paper, and to hate what you have to do for it, and yet to long to have it in order to be free from slaving for it. * to yearn toward art, music, ballet and good books, and get them only in tantalizing snatches. ~ Sylvia Plath, #NFDB
399:example of one of the big differences between Kristy and me. I was wearing a very short pink cotton dress, white tights, and black ballet slippers. I had swept all of my hair way over to one side, where it was held in place with a piece of pink cloth that matched the dress. Only one ear showed, and in it I had put my big palm tree earring. (Kristy was not wearing any jewelry.) ~ Ann M Martin, #NFDB
400: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. The performances of horse or man so treated would seem to be displays of clumsy gestures rather than of grace and beauty. What we need is that the horse should of his own accord exhibit his finest airs and paces at set signals. ~ Temple Grandin, #NFDB
401:One of these days I’m going to be surrounded by so many young gifted athletes. There must be something in the water, because everyone’s kid is a prodigy of some kind, except for mine. Gomer is a bit of a lumberer on the soccer field, and when Adolpha practices her ballet, she has the grace of a baby giraffe. They’re so like their mother. I couldn’t be prouder of my little underachievers. ~ Jen Mann, #NFDB
402:Certains joggers setaient le savon, d'autres la sueur. Les uns dévisageaient les femmes, les autres les ignoraient. C'était un ballet d'habitués qui tournaient, transpiraient, souffraient et tournaient encore. Elle aimait faire partie de ce monde de derviches tourneurs. Sa tête se vidait peu à peu, elle se sentait flotter. Les problèmes se détachaient tels des morceaux de peau morte. ~ Katherine Pancol, #NFDB
403:What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it[...] Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America. Once a child starts to excel at something—whether it's math, piano, pitching or ballet—he or she gets praise, admiration and satisfaction. This builds confidence and makes the once not-fun activity fun. ~ Amy Chua, #NFDB
404:way the world of classical music picks its future virtuosos, or the way the world of ballet picks its future ballerinas, or the way our elite educational system picks its future scientists and intellectuals. You can’t buy your way into Major Junior A hockey. It doesn’t matter who your father or mother is, or who your grandfather was, or what business your family is in. Nor does it matter ~ Malcolm Gladwell, #NFDB
405:Basketball is at its best when you have athletes in space making plays. It's the same for soccer, you have great athletes in space making plays and that's when the game becomes beautiful. You have spacing and skill and coaching. It's all synergetic. You don't have to be a basketball fan to appreciate that. You can be a person who appreciates movement. It's almost like a ballet at that point. ~ Shane Battier, #NFDB
406:didn’t know about the wizard power, but she was right about being cute. I was sort of cute in a girl-next-door kind of way that didn’t seem to encourage dates. Glo was cute in a quirky, fun way that was obviously more approachable. Truth is, I wish I was more like Glo, but I’d feel like an idiot if I tried to wear a pink ballet tutu with green-and-black striped tights and motorcycle boots. ~ Janet Evanovich, #NFDB
407:But to me, the argument is just semantics, an exercise in mental masturbation. True, Degas painted neither plein air nor spontaneously, but he had his own way of bringing his impressions into the heart of the viewer: his focus on the movement of racehorses and ballet dancers, his depiction of the ordinary milliner or washer woman or bather, caught in a complete lack of self-consciousness. ~ Barbara A Shapiro, #NFDB
408:I thought I'm going to die. So why can't I do everything? And what is this idea that I worked all day yesterday, so I'm tired today? I've never believed that.I thought, "Just suppose I could choreograph a ballet." And I did it. Suppose I could teach dance at the theater in Cleveland. And I did it. Suppose I could sing for a living - that I could stop these two jobs as a waitress and a salesperson. ~ Maya Angelou, #NFDB
409:The music came back up and the next group of little girls, slightly older, came out. And there was a lot of that in the next hour and change. Older girls, sometimes the same girls, because we got to see them do ballet, jazz, and modern, even a couple of tap dances. I liked dance, and it was no reflection on the kids, but my will to live began to seep away by about the fifth group of sequined children. I ~ Laurell K Hamilton, #NFDB
410:The women looked pretty, except when you got near them, but they were very clumsy about the waist. They had all full white sleeves of some kind or other, and most of them had big belts with a lot of strips of something fluttering from them like the dresses in a ballet, but of course there were petticoats under them. The strangest figures we saw were the Slovaks, who were more barbarian than the rest, with their ~ Bram Stoker, #NFDB
411:The available worlds looked pretty grim. They had little to offer him because he had little to offer them. He had been extremely chastened to realize that although he originally came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and Armagnac, he didn't, by himself, know how any of it worked. He couldn't do it. Left to his own devices he couldn't build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
412: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. ~ Jaci Burton,#NFDB
413:Do you know what I've learned? That although ecstasy is the ability to stand outside yourself, dance is a way of rising up into space, of discovering new dimensions while still remaining in touch with your body. When you dance, the spiritual world and the real world manage to coexist quite happily. I think classical ballet dancers dance on pointe because they're simultaneously touching the earth and reaching up to the skies. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
414:To have a platform like So You Think You Can Dance, where you're reaching this audience that's been created over the 10 years that they've been on the air. People who didn't know anything about dance and aren't going to go to the theater are learning about it, even if it's ballroom and jazz, by just turning their television ono. They're building this audience that's advanced and educated enough to introduce them to ballet. ~ Misty Copeland, #NFDB
415:It's nice for me to have a ballet as a kind of platform for creativity, because unlike modern dance or contemporary dance or downtown dance, ballet is formalized, and there's something orthodox about it that I like. I like that there's less emphasis on subversion and innovation. I actually think that my musical vernacular or my musical voice is also less inclined toward innovation and subversion. I think I'm a traditionalist. ~ Sufjan Stevens, #NFDB
416: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. ~ John McWhorter, #NFDB
417:La vida, como un comentario de otra cosa que no alcanzamos, y que está ahí al alcance del salto que no damos. La vida, un ballet sobre un tema histórico, una historia sobre un hecho vivido, un hecho vivido sobre un hecho real. La vida, fotografía del número, posesión en las tinieblas (¿mujer, monstruo?), la vida, proxeneta de la muerte, espléndida baraja, tarot de claves olvidadas que unas manos gotosas rebajan a un triste solitario. ~ Julio Cort zar, #NFDB
418:catalogued the downsides of parenthood, “son might turn out killer” would never have turned up on the list. Rather, it might have looked something like this: 1. Hassle. 2. Less time just the two of us. (Try no time just the two of us.) 3. Other people. (PTA meetings. Ballet teachers. The kid’s insufferable friends and their insufferable parents.) 4. Turning into a cow. (I was slight, and preferred to stay that way. My sister-in-law had ~ Lionel Shriver, #NFDB
419:Did any of you ever see Doctor Tetrazzini perform? I say perform advisedly because his operations were performances. He would start by throwing a scalpel across the room into the patient and then make his entrance as a ballet dancer. His speed was incredible: "I don't give them time to die", he would say. Tumors put him in a frenzy of rage. "Fucking undisciplined cells!" he would snarl, advancing on the tumor like a knife-fighter. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
420:the founding of Pixar University and Elyse Klaidman’s mind-expanding drawing classes in particular. Those first classes were such a success—of the 120 people who worked at Pixar then, 100 enrolled—that we gradually began expanding P.U.’s curriculum. Sculpting, painting, acting, meditation, belly dancing, live-action filmmaking, computer programming, design and color theory, ballet—over the years, we have offered free classes in all of them. ~ Ed Catmull, #NFDB
421:Yeah, unfortunately [ films like Miss Julie are a dying breed]. And that is sad, because we need these. Like we need books, we need classical music, we need ballet, we need opera, to remind us really of who we are and why we are, and we need in movie houses - even to be in a movie - where you sit and see not only excitement and man-hero, woman-hero, you need quietly, just like that Hawking movie we talked about, to know how people overcome. ~ Liv Ullmann, #NFDB
422:At first I didn't understand what [Thelonious Monk] was doing, but I went back again, and what I can say about Monk is that I heard ancient Africa in his music. When he played, it was like a ballet. He captured the sound of the universe. Monk could take a triad, a simple chord, and make it sound dissonant. I'm sure that element he had in his piano was part of the two years he spent traveling with his mother in gospel music in the tent shows. ~ Randy Weston, #NFDB
423:The Opera ghost really existed. He was not, as was long believed, a creature of the imagination of the artists, the superstition of the managers, or a product of the absurd and impressionable brains of the young ladies of the ballet, their mothers, the box-keepers, the cloak-room attendants or the concierge. Yes, he existed in flesh and blood, although he assumed the complete appearance of a real phantom; that is to say, of a spectral shade. When ~ Gaston Leroux, #NFDB
424:The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the "Red Death. ~ Edgar Allan Poe, #NFDB
425: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. ~ Ann Patchett, #NFDB
426:I've been trained in dancing and I used to be quite good, though I am a bit rusty right now. But I could probably brush up in a couple of months. The funny thing is that I actually took classes from Savion Glover, who worked in Happy Feet, when I was a kid. Isn't that wild? I was part of a selected group that was brought into New York from New Jersey (which is where I'm from) to study, every Saturday: ballet, jazz and tap. It was a musical comedy group. ~ Brittany Murphy, #NFDB
427: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. My wife too. She's a ballet dancer, and she's known what she wanted to do since she was 5. My mother used to tell this story about how our TV set had been taken to be repaired, and back then, they took the set out of the console. So there was this empty console with an empty TV screen in it, and I would climb inside and be like, "I'm on TV!" ~ Tim Matheson, #NFDB
428:When I was playing college football, they would take the football team to a ballet school. We would learn to do tour jete's to prepare us when you are running in pursuit to tackle a ball carrier and you get hit, or somebody comes from another angle. This way you can spin away from the hit and your foot is out so you can go right into your run - basically, it pushed us toward the tackle. There's a good tweet: "Take ballet - it will push you towards the tackle." ~ Gary Busey, #NFDB
429:The first is that everyone—including Mom and Dad—has to do a hard thing. A hard thing is something that requires daily deliberate practice. I’ve told my kids that psychological research is my hard thing, but I also practice yoga. Dad tries to get better and better at being a real estate developer; he does the same with running. My oldest daughter, Amanda, has chosen playing the piano as her hard thing. She did ballet for years, but later quit. So did Lucy. ~ Angela Duckworth, #NFDB
430:The Opera ghost really existed. He was not, as was long believed, a
creature of the imagination of the artists, the superstition of the
managers, or a product of the absurd and impressionable brains of the
young ladies of the ballet, their mothers, the box-keepers, the
cloak-room attendants or the concierge. Yes, he existed in flesh and
blood, although he assumed the complete appearance of a real phantom;
that is to say, of a spectral shade. ~ Gaston Leroux,#NFDB
431:Fascia knows where you are in the world; it's loaded with position sensors that contribute to your sense of balance and feeds those bearings directly to that fear-conditioning corner of your brain, the amygdala. Any movement grooved into the fascia feels soothing, gratifying, efficient; try to unlearn it, as any batting coach or ballet teacher will tell you, and you're in for a struggle. New movements, no matter how necessary or logical, just feel wrong. ~ Christopher McDougall, #NFDB
432: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.’ ‘He doesn’t want to be a pop star, he wants to take photographs.’ ‘My point still stands. It is simply not true that you can achieve anything if you love it enough – it just isn’t. Life has limitations and the sooner he faces up to this fact then the better off he’ll be! ~ David Nicholls, #NFDB
433:Chloe Honum's brilliant first book The Tulip-Flame traces an identity forming within radically divergent but interlocking systems: a family traumatized by the mother's suicide, a failed relationship, the practice of ballet, a garden-each strict, exacting. And with 'a crow's sky-knowing mind,' Honum in every case transfigures emotion by way of elegant language and formal restraint. Chloe Honum is 'one astounding flame' of a poet, and I predict a long-lasting one. ~ Claudia Emerson, #NFDB
434:She liked to feel focused. She was proud of her ability to focus. Her daily life was made up of a thousand tiny pieces—“Need coriander”; “Isabel’s haircut”; “Who will watch Polly at ballet on Tuesday while I take Esther to speech therapy?”—like one of those terrible giant jigsaws that Isabel used to spend hours doing. And yet Cecilia, who had no patience for puzzles, knew exactly where each tiny piece of her life belonged and where it needed to be slotted in next. ~ Liane Moriarty, #NFDB
435:Let us not compare Edward Snowden's situation with that of Chelsea Manning or Jeremy Hammond, who is also imprisoned in the United States. As a result of WikiLeaks' hard work, Edward Snowden has political asylum, has travel documents, lives with his girlfriend, goes to the ballet and earns substantial speaking fees. Edward Snowden is essentially free and happy. That is no coincidence. It was my strategy to undo the chilling effect of the 35 year Manning sentence and it has worked. ~ Julian Assange, #NFDB
436:how the great pairs of detectives know each other’s every thought as surely as lifelong ballet partners in a pas de deux. I never knew and never will whether either Cassie or I was a great detective, though I suspect not, but I know this: we made a team worthy of bard-songs and history books. This was our last and greatest dance together, danced in a tiny interview room with darkness outside and rain falling soft and relentless on the roof, for no audience but the doomed and the dead. ~ Tana French, #NFDB
437:Well, that's why I really love Diego Della Valle, because he's crazy. Instead of going out to find a top business school graduate, for whom it would have taken five years to see the difference between a ballet shoe and a book, he asked me to revive the label. It's a bit like Balenciaga. Brands like Vivier are pillars - they are monuments of fashion; they are names we don't forget. But the general public doesn't necessarily know that and therefore we had to get the name re-known. ~ Ines de La Fressange, #NFDB
438:Nothing could be more comfortable than writing about the ballet from books. A ballet he had never seen was an art in another world. It was an unrivaled armchair reverie, a lyric from some paradise. He called his work research, but it was actually free, uncontrolled fantasy. He preferred not to savor the ballet in the flesh; rather he savored the phantasms of his own dancing imagination, called up by Western books and pictures. It was like being in love with someone he had never seen. ~ Yasunari Kawabata, #NFDB
439:The course I will be seeking to pursue with the company is one of reconciliation,” Mr. Cherkaoui said in a statement. “For a number of years there has been a constantly growing exchange between the different dance disciplines, as classical ballet and contemporary dance increasingly complement each other.” Ben Munisteri Is Back, Out of a Time Warp Julieta Cervantes for The New York Times Katie Weir, foreground, in a piece by the choreographer Ben Munisteri, at Actors Fund Arts Center in Brooklyn. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
440:We must first realize that dancing is an absolutely independent art, not merely a secondary accompanying one. I believe that it is one of the great arts. . . . The important thing in ballet is the movement itself. A ballet may contain a story, but the visual spectacle . . . is the essential element. The choreographer and the dancer must remember that they reach the audience through the eye. It's the illusion created which convinces the audience, much as it is with the work of a magician. ~ George Balanchine, #NFDB
441:There’s something nice about out-and-out children’s books with no sex and a happy ending—Ransome, Streatfeild, that kind of thing. It isn’t very challenging, and you know what you’re getting, but what you’re getting is a nice wholesome story about children messing about in boats, or learning ballet or whatever, and they’ll have minor triumphs and minor disasters and everything will work out fine in the end. It’s cheering, especially after reading Chekhov yesterday. I’m so glad I’m not Russian. Still, ~ Jo Walton, #NFDB
442:The paintings that laughed at him merrily from the walls were like nothing he had ever seen or dreamed of. Gone were the flat, thin surfaces. Gone was the sentimental sobriety. Gone was the brown gravy in which Europe had been bathing its pictures for centuries. Here were pictures riotously mad with the sun. With light and air and throbbing vivacity. Paintings of ballet girls backstage, done in primitive reds, greens, and blues thrown next to each other irreverantly. He looked at the signature. Degas. ~ Irving Stone, #NFDB
443:When you train as a dancer, you understand you have to work exceptionally hard. I think dancers are the hardest - working people in show business. You have to push your body beyond where you thought it could go. It's athleticism. Perfection doesn't exist, but with classical ballet, there is an ideal, and I got obsessed with that ideal. In some ways, it was problematic because I don't have an ideal ballet body, but the discipline is what I carry with me to this day. That's my park, the discipline of dancing. ~ Laverne Cox, #NFDB
444:While he was gently pressing the little balls flat with a fork, he chuckled to himself, remembering when she taught him to drive. It was one of the only times he heard her raise her voice, get all flustered and upset. His feet were so big and his legs so long, he was rugged on the accelerator, the brakes. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, John! You have to be gentler! Slower, more graceful! I should have sent you to ballet lessons instead of football! It was a surprise she didn’t die of a heart attack, riding with him. ~ Robyn Carr, #NFDB
445: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. ~ Katherine Owen, #NFDB
446:She wasn’t getting it. They never teased her. They never followed her around with their phones, trying to catch her in a compromising position. They never called her a ho-bag or a troll or said she danced like an elephant on crank. They never, not once, dribbled pee in her ballet bag or stuck shaved pubes in her ChapStick. They never told her she wouldn’t ever be good enough to make the New York City Ballet, and that they’d wave to her from the stage, maybe, one day, if they remembered who she was when they were famous. ~ Nova Ren Suma, #NFDB
447:In our family, we live by the Hard Thing Rule. It has three parts. The first is that everyone—including Mom and Dad—has to do a hard thing. A hard thing is something that requires daily deliberate practice. I’ve told my kids that psychological research is my hard thing, but I also practice yoga. Dad tries to get better and better at being a real estate developer; he does the same with running. My oldest daughter, Amanda, has chosen playing the piano as her hard thing. She did ballet for years, but later quit. So did Lucy. ~ Angela Duckworth, #NFDB
448:And in between the two, in between the sky and the sea, were all the winds. And there were all the nights and all the moons. To be a castaway is to be a point perpetually at the centre of a circle. However much things may appear to change-the sea may shift from whisper to rage, the sky might go from fresh blue to blinding white to darkest black-the geometry never changes. Your gaze is always a radius. The circumference is ever great. In fact, the circles multiply. To be a castaway is to be caught in a harrowing ballet of circles. ~ Yann Martel, #NFDB
449:And in between the two, in between the sky and the sea, were all the winds. And there were all the nights and all the moons. To be a castaway is to be a point perpetually at the centre of a circle. However much things may appear to change—the sea may shift from whisper to rage, the sky might go from fresh blue to blinding white to darkest black—the geometry never changes. Your gaze is always a radius. The circumference is ever great. In fact, the circles multiply. To be a castaway is to be caught in a harrowing ballet of circles. ~ Yann Martel, #NFDB
450:Dark, cold, and snowbound, Russia has the sort of climate in which the spirit of Christmas burns brightest. And that is why Tchaikovsky seems to have captured the sound of it better than anyone else. I tell you that not only will every European child of the twentieth century know the melodies of The Nutcracker, they will imagine their Christmas just as it is depicted in the ballet; and on the Christmas Eves of their dotage, Tchaikovsky’s tree will grow from the floor of their memories until they are gazing up in wonder once again. ~ Amor Towles, #NFDB
451:My parents used to park us kids at the public library in downtown Honolulu every Saturday. They'd leave us there at 8 A.M. and pick us up at 4 P.M. - so between those hours, you'd better find something to do! I sat upstairs in the picture room and went through opera, ballet, and theater books. I loved the photographs of people wearing elaborate makeup and costumes - they really pulled at me inside. I was in that library every week for years, until I was about 13. I had a rich interior life, because I didn't have much of a social life. ~ Bette Midler, #NFDB
452:I’ve witnessed this with the former hockey player who takes his son out to skate before he can even walk. Or in the mother who gave up her ballet dreams when she married, but now scrapes her daughter’s hair into a bun and watches from the wings of the stage. We are not, as you’d expect, orchestrating their lives; we are not even trying for a second chance. We’re hoping that if this one thing takes root, it might take up enough light and space to keep something else from developing in our children: the disappointment we’ve already lived. ~ Jodi Picoult, #NFDB
453:On The Stage
Lights, in a multi-coloured mist,
From indigo to amethyst,
A whirling mist of multi-coloured lights;
And after, wigs and tights,
Then faces, then a glimpse of profiles, then
Eyes, and a mist again;
And rouge, and always tights, and wigs, and tights.
You see the ballet so, and so,
From amethyst to indigo;
You see a dance of phantoms, but I see
A girl, who smiles to me;
Her cheeks, across the rouge, and in her eyes
I know what memories,
What memories and messages for me.
~ Arthur Symons,#NFDB
454:When Nureyev appeared in San Francisco not long ago there were quite a few ballet fans who flew all the way from New York to see him. The mystics would point out how fruitless it is to go to see important people when our first priority is to see ourselves. We think we know Tom, Dick and Harry, but we really know everyone, including ourselves, only on the surface level. If we could see our real Self coming down the street, we would wonder who this beautiful, radiant, magnificent creature could be. We would not be able to take our eyes off him. ~ Eknath Easwaran, #NFDB
455:Some people even think that I'm still just not right for it [ballet]. And I think it's shocking because they hear those words from critics saying I'm too bulky, I'm too busty. And then they meet me in person and they're like, you look like a ballerina. And I think it's just something maybe that I will never escape from, those people who are narrow-minded. But my mission, my voice, my story, my message, is not for them. And I think it's more important to think of the people that I am influencing and helping to see a broader picture of what beauty is. ~ Misty Copeland, #NFDB
456:Opera halls, ballets, and large art museums receive more funding--and not all from the government--than do popular art and what might be considered popular music venues...But there are plenty of innovative musicians...who have had as much trouble surviving as symphony orchestras and ballet companies...Why not invest in the future of music, instead of building fortresses to preserve its past?...The 2011 annual operating budget for the New York Metropolitan Opera is $325 million; a big chunk of that, $182 million, came from donations from wealthy patrons. ~ David Byrne, #NFDB
457:The ballet. I saw in the fugitive beauty of a dancer's gesture a symbol of life. It was achieved at the cost of unending effort but, with all the forces of gravity against it, a fleeting poise in mid-air, a lovely attitude worthy to be made immortal in a bas-relief, it was lost as soon as it was gained and there remained no more than the memory of an exquisite emotion. So life, lived variously and largely, becomes a work of art only when brought to its beautiful conclusion and is reduced to nothingness in the moment when it arrives at perfection. ~ W Somerset Maugham, #NFDB
458:Realization that i couldn't be a ballet dancer was a blessing in disguise because that was the first time I felt like I stepped into adulthood. I realized, Okay, this is not going to work out. It was frustrating for about a year because I didn't know what to do with the creativity and the discipline that dancing had instilled in me from a very young age. But then I moved to Paris to model, and that was my cultural awakening. Now, I think dancing has been the biggest thing in my life, much more so than modeling, and it still helps me enormously in my work. ~ Diane Kruger, #NFDB
459:Don’t you see?’ said Connie, hurling cutlery at the drawer. ‘Even if it’s hard, he has to try! If he loves it, we have to let him try. Why must you always have to stomp on his dreams?’ ‘I’ve got nothing against his dreams as long as they’re attainable.’ ‘But if they’re attainable then they’re not dreams!’ ‘And that’s why it’s a waste of time!’ I said. ‘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.’ ‘He doesn’t want ~ David Nicholls, #NFDB
460:if there’s one thing I learned this year, it’s that you rise up to the circumstances when they are presented to you. We are so much stronger than we think we are. But sometimes, we go through decades without having a reason to be tested. The thing about life is, it always hits us. No one leads a charmed life. Even the blond, gorgeous, picture-perfect, popular rich girl harbors secrets. Even the football captain. Even the rich mother of two who married her hot millionaire ex-student. The ballet prodigy. Everyone’s got a story, and we all have chapters we’d rather not read aloud. ~ L J Shen, #NFDB
461: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. ~ Jennifer Homans, #NFDB
462:I just stay healthy all year round. I try to feel good in my skin. For me, I have trained in ballet my whole life so my body really feels best when I feel strong and tight and toned, and I think that comes from years and years of constant training as a ballerina. Leading up to the show, getting out there in your underwear, you just want to feel your best mainly in your head than more anything else. Obviously you want to feel good physically too, so it's more just in your head, pushing yourself, approaching this challenge and taking the opportunity to push yourself a little further. ~ Angelina Jolie, #NFDB
463:The sex act is emotionally the richest and the most imaginatively charged event in our lives, comparable only to the embrace of our children as a source of affection and mystery. But no kinaesthetic language has yet been devised to describe it in detail, and without one we are in the position of an unqualified observer viewing an operation for brain surgery. Ballet, gymnastics, American football and judo are furnished with elaborate kinaesthetic languages, but it's still easier to describe the tango or the cockpit take-off procedures for a 747 than to recount in detail an act of love. ~ J G Ballard, #NFDB
464:Dominika told Bratok that she no longer respected or trusted him; they had all used her. She told him that ever since ballet school her choices had been taken away, she had been shoved this way and that, the things most dear to her had been stolen. It was why she had decided to work with them. Nate and Bratok and Forsyth had been like family; they knew what she needed. And everyone was so smart, so prefessional.
But the result turned out the same. They had colluded against her. Even the general had broken her faith. Her Russian mind saw conspiracy, her Russian soul felt betrayal. ~ Jason Matthews,#NFDB
465:Your Overworld persona is a hero,” said Bao. “Heartbeat is a hero. Calaca's a psychopath, but he was right about one thing — the internet is the real world. What you do there matters, and what you do here matters. I've seen you spend days nursing a sick sister back to health; I've seen you work triple shifts in this restaurant to pay your family's mortgage. You took Gabi to ballet when your parents were too scared to send her. Three nights ago you ran into the middle of a freeway to rescue your friend. You're not just a hero, Mari, you're my hero. If anyone can figure this out, it's you. ~ Dan Wells, #NFDB
466:To Maecenas
Than you, O valued friend of mine,
A better patron _non est_!
Come, quaff my home-made Sabine wine,-You'll find it poor but honest.
I put it up that famous day
You patronized the ballet,
And the public cheered you such a way
As shook your native valley.
Caecuban and the Calean brand
May elsewhere claim attention;
But _I_ have none of these on hand,-For reasons I'll not mention.
ENVOY
So, come! though favors I bestow
Cannot be called extensive,
Who better than my friend should know
That they're at least expensive?
~ Eugene Field,#NFDB
467:Behind this populism, however, lay a serious purpose. Balanchine wanted nothing less than to build a new civic culture in America. In 1952 he wrote to Kirstein, explaining that it was vital to have free performances of ballet, drama, and opera for children: “The new generation which would come to the performances will be the future citizens of the United States.…We have to do something for their souls and minds.” Or as he later put it in an interview in which he complained about the country’s rampant commercialism, “Nobody advertises soul. Nobody even mentions it, and that’s what we lack. ~ Jennifer Homans, #NFDB
468:Amy [Winehouse] increasingly became defined by her addiction. Our media though is more interested in tragedy than talent, so the ink began to defect from praising her gift to chronicling her downfall. The destructive personal relationships, the blood soaked ballet slippers, the aborted shows, that YouTube madness with the baby mice. In the public perception this ephemeral tittle-tattle replaced her timeless talent. This and her manner in our occasional meetings brought home to me the severity of her condition. Addiction is a serious disease; it will end with jail, mental institutions, or death. ~ Russell Brand, #NFDB
469:At one point, he dated a woman from a much more affluent family than his. She was refined and sophisticated, Freireich was a bruiser from Humboldt Park who looked and sounded like the muscle for for some Depression-era gangster. "She took me to the symphony. It was the first time I'd ever heard classical music," he remembered. "I'd never seen a ballet. I'd never seen a play. Outside of our little TV that my mother purchased, I had no education to speak of. There was no literature, no art, no music, no dance, no nothing. It was just food. And not getting killed or beaten up. I was pretty raw. ~ Malcolm Gladwell, #NFDB
470:This kind of compartmentalizing—separating one’s livelihood from one’s social aspirations—is part of the reason David Koch, the hidden hand behind a lot of ultraconservatives and, reportedly, the Tea Party movement in the United States, transforms himself into a respected arts patron by funding a theater at Lincoln Center, or why at Swiss bank that helps U.S. depositors avoid paying taxes generously supports symphony halls and the ballet. It’s almost as if there are moral scales, and by tossing some loot on one side, you can balance out the precarious situation your reputation might be getting into on the other. ~ David Byrne, #NFDB
471: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. ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
472:The hell with them. They wanted a Sparrow, they would get a Sparrow. No one knew she could see the colors. Mikhail had said she was the best student he ever had in seeing people. She would stay. She would learn.
She told herself this wasn't love. This school, this mansion secluded behind walls topped with broken glass, was an engine of the State that institutionalized and dehumanized love. It didn't count, it was physical sex, it was training, like ballet school. In the flickering light in the musty library Dominika told herself she was going to go through with this, to spite these vnebrachnyi rebyonoki, these bastards. ~ Jason Matthews,#NFDB
473:our Earth is taking part in a fantastic cosmic ballet. First, it pulls us through space at a speed of nearly twenty miles per second during its annual journey around the Sun. The Sun then drags the Earth with it during its voyage through the Milky Way at a speed of 140 miles per second. The Milky Way is falling in turn at approximately fifty-five miles per second toward Andromeda. And there's more to come. The Local Group that contains our galaxy and Andromeda is falling at about 375 miles per second toward the Virgo cluster of galaxies, which is in turn moving toward a large complex of galaxies called the Great Attractor. ~ Matthieu Ricard, #NFDB
474:Nate watched her wash her lithe body, white scars crisscrossing her ribs, ballet calves flexing as she rotated under the water. He got out of bed and joined her in the shower. Nate was muscular and thin with unruly black hair and brown eyes that missed little. “Can you see what I wrote?” asked Dominika, soaping his chest, tracing his own scars, the brown one across his belly, the angry red furrows on his arms. They were stitched mannequins, the two of them. Nate did not answer, but kissed her, holding her head in his hands, enveloping her in his red cloud. “Ti moy,” she said, wrapping her arms around his neck. “You are mine. ~ Jason Matthews, #NFDB
475: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. ~ Alice Sebold,#NFDB
476:Clearing his throat, he kept his tone even and flat. “Kiara Zamir, the dancer.” Hauk gave a low, appreciative whistle. “What was she doing with those scabs?” Nykyrian cut a droll stare at the Andarion and a question that was so stupid there was no reason to even bother answering it. “Yo, dumbass,” Darling said sarcastically. “What do you think she’d be doing with them? Giving them ballet lessons?” Hauk narrowed his gaze at Nykyrian. “Tell me again why I can’t kill him?” “You’re afraid of handling explosives.” Hauk cursed. “One day I’m going to get over that and when I do…” “I’ll wisely stop annoying you.” Darling winked at him. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon, #NFDB
477:there are places in the world where real life is still happening, far away from here, in a pre-Hitler Europe, where hundreds of lights are lit every evening, ladies and gentlemen gather to drink coffee with cream in oak-panelled rooms, or sit comfortably in splendid coffee-houses under gilt chandeliers, stroll arm in arm to the opera or the ballet, observe from close-up the lives of great artists, passionate love affairs, broken hearts, the painter’s girlfriend falling in love with his best friend the composer, and going out at midnight bareheaded in the rain to stand alone on the ancient bridge whose reflection trembles in the river. * ~ Amos Oz, #NFDB
478:Nijinsky was badgered by the Outsider’s greatest enemy, human triviality. There was a ballet season in New York, with Nijinsky’s own company and a new Nijinsky ballet, and endless difficulties and annoyances to be overcome. Nijinfcky had no business ability; his temperament was almost completely introverted, contemplative (various observers have spoken of him as having the face of a Tibetan Llama, of ‘a Buddha in meditation’, of an Egyptian statue); these endless, unimportant demands by the outside world were an immense strain. In this state of strain, the war began to weigh heavily on him; he was haunted by visions of dead soldiers. ~ Colin Wilson, #NFDB
479:Harry went closer and could see she was attractive. And there was something about the relaxed way she spoke, the way she looked him straight in the eye, that suggested that she was also self-assured. A professional woman, he guessed. Something requiring a cool, rational mind. Estate agent, head of a department in a bank, politician or something like that. Well-off at any rate, of that he was fairly sure. It wasn’t just the coat and the colossal house behind her, but something in the attitude and the high, aristocratic cheekbones. She walked down the steps as if walking along a straight line, made it seem easy. Ballet lessons, Harry thought. ~ Jo Nesb, #NFDB
480:I need to be casual but not too casual. Dressy but not too dressy. I need him to think I just threw on the first thing I found and that I'm not taking this too seriously or overthinking it or even that I was thinking about it at all. Because I'm not. I'm totally not thinking about him, and I don't want him to think I was thinking about him, but I don't want him to think that I'm not thinking about him, because clearly he thought about me enough to ask me out and it would be mean not to be thinking about him at all, so I need just the right amount of thinking, and I'm not sure if that means boots and a skirt or skinny jeans and ballet flats. Help! ~ Gemma Halliday, #NFDB
481:When I hurt, and I hurt often, I raced for the music, the costumes, the ballet shoes on which I could spin and twirl and dance away my troubles. And somewhere in that crimson-colored never-never land where I pirouetted madly, in a wild and crazy effort to exhaust myself into insensibility, I saw that man, shadowy and distant, half-hidden behind towering white columns that rose clear up to a purple sky. In a passionate pas de deux he danced with me, forever apart, no matter how hard I sought to draw nearer and leap into his arms, where I could feel them protective about me, supporting me . . . and with him I’d find, at last, a safe place to live and love. ~ V C Andrews, #NFDB
482:What do men need? #1 need: to be fulfilled (including sexual fulfillment) #2 need: to be respected (your wife’s respect is the highest priority) #3 need: to be needed (what self-respecting guy wants to come home to a wife who is determined to do everything on her own and doesn’t seem to need him?) What do women need? #1 need: affection (cuddling for the sake of closeness) #2 need: communication (she needs words, sentences, and whole paragraphs when you get home from work—not grunts) #3 need: commitment to family (she needs to know you’ll be there at your son’s soccer tournament and your daughter’s ballet recital, and she won’t have to wonder if you forgot) ~ Kevin Leman, #NFDB
483:I Cannot Dance Upon My Toes
326
I cannot dance upon my Toes—
No Man instructed me—
But oftentimes, among my mind,
A Glee possesseth me,
That had I Ballet knowledge—
Would put itself abroad
In Pirouette to blanch a Troupe—
Or lay a Prima, mad,
And though I had no Gown of Gauze—
No Ringlet, to my Hair,
Nor hopped to Audiences—like Birds,
One Claw upon the Air,
Nor tossed my shape in Eider Balls,
Nor rolled on wheels of snow
Till I was out of sight, in sound,
The House encore me so—
Nor any know I know the Art
I mention—easy—Here—
Nor any Placard boast me—
It's full as Opera—
~ Emily Dickinson,#NFDB
484:Maybe it is not the destructiveness of the volcano that pleases most, though everyone loves a conflagration, but its defiance of the law of gravity to which every inorganic mass is subject. What pleases first at the sight of the plant world is its vertical upward direction. That is why we love trees. Perhaps we attend to a volcano for its elevation, like ballet. How high the molten rocks soar, how far above the mushrooming cloud. The thrill is that the mountain blows itself up, even if it must then like the dancer return to earth; even if it does not simply descend—it falls, falls on us. But first it goes up, it flies. Whereas everything pulls, drags down. Down. ~ Susan Sontag, #NFDB
485:One associate said Koch had confided that he gave away approximately 40 percent of his income each year, which he estimated at about $1 billion. This of course left him with an annual income of some $600 million and considerably helped ease his tax burden, but he enjoyed the role, a family member said, in part because it bought him respectability. There was another side to his spending, however, that was then still largely secret. While David was happy to put his name on some of the country’s most esteemed and beloved cultural and scientific institutions and to take a public bow at the ballet, his family’s prodigious political spending was a much more private affair. ~ Jane Mayer, #NFDB
486:It is often said by the critics of Christian origins that certain ritual feasts, processions or dances are really of pagan origin. They might as well say that our legs are of pagan origin. Nobody ever disputed that humanity was human before it was Christian; and no Church manufactured the legs with which men walked or danced, either in a pilgrimage or a ballet. What can really be maintained, so as to carry not a little conviction, is this: that where such a Church has existed it has preserved not only the processions but the dances; not only the cathedral but the carnival. One of the chief claims of Christian civilisation is to have preserved things of pagan origin. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
487:Sometimes parents don't find what they're looking for it their child, so they plant seeds for what they'd like to grow there instead. I've witnessed this with the former hockey player who takes his son out to skate before he can even walk. Or in the mother who gave up her ballet dreams when she married, but now scrapes her daughter's hair into a bun and watched from the wings of the stage. We are not, as you'd expect, orchestrating their lives; we are not even trying for a second chance. We are hoping that if this one thing takes root, it might take up enough light and space to keep something else from developing in our children: the disappointment we've already lived. ~ Jodi Picoult, #NFDB
488:All of us are meaning-seekers. We approach every painting, novel, film, symphony, or ballet unconsciously hoping it will move us one step further on the journey toward answering the question ‘Why am I here?’ People living in the postmodern world, however, are faced with an excruciating dilemma. Their hearts long to find ultimate meaning, while at the same time their critical minds do not believe it exists. We are homesick, but have no home. So we turn to the arts and aesthetics to satisfy our thirst for the Absolute. But if we want to find our true meaning in life, our search cannot end there. Art or beauty is not the destination; it is a signpost pointing toward our desired destination. ~ Ian Morgan Cron, #NFDB
489:Pragmatic, blithe, the eternal, cockeyed optimist, Chris sings when he works in the gardens. When he shaves in the mornings he hums some ballet tune, feeling no trepidations, no regrets, as if long, long ago he had been the man who danced in the shadows of the attic and had never, never let me see his face. Did he know all along that just as he had won over me in all other games it would be him in the end?
Why hadn’t I known?
Who had shut my eyes?
It must have been Momma who told me once, “Marry a man with dark, dark eyes, Cathy. Dark eyes feel so terribly intense about everything.”
What a laugh! As if blue eyes lacked some profound steadfastness; she should have known better. ~ V C Andrews,#NFDB
490:The impulse to laugh at healthy people who nonetheless fall down is by no means universal, however, was brought to my attention unpleasantly at a performance of Swan Lake by the Royal Ballet in London, England. I was in the audience with my daughter Nanny, who was about sixteen then. She is forty-one now, in the summer of 1996. That must have been twenty-five years ago now!
A ballerina, dancing on her toes, went deedly-deedly-deedly into the wings as she was supposed to do. But then there was a sound backstage as though she had put her foot in a bucket and then gone down an iron stairway with her foot still in the bucket.
I instantly laughed like hell.
I was the only person to do so. ~ Kurt Vonnegut,#NFDB
491: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, Bach, 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. I took my choice. I raised the fifth of vodka and drank it straight. The Russians knew something. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
492:In the lightless void he was staring at, an image of Kiara dancing in her last ballet floated before his eyes, which didn’t help him calm his arousal at all. Damn it, why did he feel like this? But then she’d always been able to stir his senses. Every time he’d seen her dance, she’d touched a part of his soul—a part of him he preferred to think was long dead and damned. She, alone, had made him see beauty in a universe he normally despised. Had made him feel something other than cold, corrupt emptiness. She was beauty and gentleness personified. Nykyrian scoffed at his own stupidity. He knew better. No one was good and no one over the age of ten was unscarred. Life was brutal and it made victims of everyone. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon, #NFDB
493:First of all, I want you to think of the city as a collection of people. That's easy, right? You think of Minneapolis or Chicago or Milwaukee, you think of hundreds of thousands of people. Millions of people. That's what you think of right away. Maybe you think of sky-scrapers too, I don't know. But I think of people. The next thing you should think about is ideas. Think of each of those millions of people as a set of ideas. Like, That woman is a ballerina, she thinks about ballet. Or, that man is an architect, he thinks about buildings. If you begin thinking about it that way, a city is the greatest place in the world. It's millions of people, brushing up against one another, exchanging ideas, all the time, at every hour of the day. ~ Nickolas Butler, #NFDB
494:Suddenly the dressing-room of La Sorelli, one of the principal dancers, was invaded by half-a-dozen young ladies of the ballet, who had come up from the stage after “dancing” Polyeucte. They rushed in amid great confusion, some giving vent to forced and unnatural laughter, others to cries of terror. Sorelli, who wished to be alone for a moment to “run through” the speech which she was to make to the resigning managers, looked around angrily at the mad and tumultuous crowd. It was little Jammes—the girl with the tip-tilted nose, the forget-me-not eyes, the rose-red cheeks and the lily-white neck and shoulders—who gave the explanation in a trembling voice:
“It’s the ghost!” And she locked the door.
- Chapter 1: Is it the Ghost? ~ Gaston Leroux,#NFDB
495:Pour Prendre Conge
I'm sick of embarking in dories
Upon an emotional sea.
I'm wearied of playing Dolores
(A role never written for me).
I'll never again like a cub lick
My wounds while I squeal at the hurt.
No more I'll go walking in public,
My heart hanging out of my shirt.
I'm tired of entwining me garlands
Of weather-worn hemlock and bay.
I'm over my longing for far landsI wouldn't give that for Cathay.
I'm through with performing the ballet
Of love unrequited and told.
Euterpe, I tender you vale;
Good-by, and take care of that cold.
I'm done with this burning and giving
And reeling the rhymes of my woes.
And how I'll be making my living,
The Lord in His mystery knows.
~ Dorothy Parker,#NFDB
496:The living cell is the most complex system of its size known to mankind. Its host of specialized molecules, many found nowhere else but within living material, are themselves already enormously complex. They execute a dance of exquisite fidelity, orchestrated with breathtaking precision. Vastly more elaborate than the most complicated ballet, the dance of life encompasses countless molecular performers in synergetic coordination. Yet this is a dance with no sign of a choreographer. No intelligent supervisor, no mystic force, no conscious controlling agency swings the molecules into place at the right time, chooses the appropriate players, closes the links, uncouples the partners, moves them on. The dance of life is spontaneous, self-sustaining, and self-creating. ~ Paul Davies, #NFDB
497:I'd learned many years earlier to hold my true friends close. I was still deeply connected to the group of women who had started gathering for Saturday playdates years earlier, back in our diaper-bag days in Chicago, when our children blithely pitched food from their high chairs and all of us were so tired we wanted to weep. These were the friends who'd held me together, dropping off groceries when I was too busy to shop, picking up the girls for ballet when I was behind on work or just needing a break. A number of them had hopped planes to join me for unglamourous stops on the campaign trail, giving me emotional ballast when I needed it most. Friendships between women, as any woman will tell you, are built of a thousand small kindnesses like these, swapped back and forth and over again. ~ Michelle Obama, #NFDB
498:Love is an afternoon of fishing when I'd sooner be at the ballet.
Love is eating burnt toast and lumpy graving with a big smile.
Love is hearing the words 'You're beautiful' as I fail to squeeze into my fat jeans.
Love is refusing to bring up the past, even if doing so would be a slam dunk to prove your point.
Love is your hand wiping away my tears, trying to erase streaks of mascara.
Love is the warm hug that extinguishes an argument.
Love is a humbly-uttered apology, even if not at fault.
Love is easy to recognize but so hard to define; however, I think it boils down to this...
Love is caring so much about the feelings of someone else, you sacrifice whatever it takes to help him or her feel better.
In other words, love is my heart being sensitive to yours. ~ Richelle E Goodrich,#NFDB
499:I took my bottle and went to my bedroom. I undressed down to my shorts and went to bed. 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, Bach, 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.
I took my choice. I raised the fifth of vodka and drank it straight. The Russians knew something. ~ Charles Bukowski,#NFDB
500:Alright. Let's get realistic now. You know and I know that the function of that number was just to provide some sort of warm-up trash before we do something HEAVY. Something a little bit harder to listen to, but which is probably better for you in the LONG RUN. The item in this instance, which will be better for you in the LONG RUN, and if we only had a little more space up here we could make it visual for you, is "Some Ballet Music," which we've played at most of our concert series in Europe. Generally in halls where we had a little bit more space and Motorhead and Kansas could actually fling themselves across the stage, and give you their teenage interpretation of the art of The Ballet. I don't think it's too safe to do it here, maybe they can just hug each other a little bit and do some calisthenics in the middle of the stage. ~ Frank Zappa, #NFDB
501:I watch the beautiful performance with an ache in my chest.
Then, just when I can’t stand the sadness anymore, a dancer floats out from the side of the stage. A dancer in ragged clothes, filthy and half starved. He’s not even in ballet shoes. He’s just barefoot as he glides out to take his place in the dance.
The other dancers turn to him, and it’s clear that he is one of them. One of the lost ones. By the look on their faces, they weren’t expecting him. This is not part of the practiced show. He must have seen them onstage and joined in.
Amazingly, the dance continues without a missed beat. The newcomer simply glides into place, and the final dancer who should have danced solo with her missing partner dances with the newcomer.
It is full of joy, and the ballerina actually laughs. Her voice is clear and high, and it lifts us all. ~ Susan Ee,#NFDB
502:Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations. ~ Jane Jacobs, #NFDB
503:Up rose the scent of green-apple shampoo. Of river stones once the flood has gone. The taste of winter sky laced with sulfur fumes. A kiss beneath a white-hearted tree. A hot still day holding its breath.
We removed the contents one by one.
There were two blue plastic hair combs. A tough girl's black rubber-band bracelet. A newspaper advertisement for a secretarial school folded in half. A blond braid wrapped in gladwrap. A silver necklace with a half-a-broken-heart pendant. An address, written in a leftward-slanting hand, on a scrap of paper. Ballet shoes wrapped in laces.
From the box came the sound of bicycle tires humming on hot pavement. Of bare feet running through crackling grass. Of frantic fingers unstitching an embroidered flower. Of paper wings rising on a sudden wind. Of the lake breathing against the shore.
I didn't say anything. I kept very still. ~ Karen Foxlee,#NFDB
504:Dickey on Capote
This small childlike individual, this self-styled, self-made, self-taught country boy—what did he teach himself? To concentrate: to close out, and close in: to close with. His writing came, first, from a great and very real interest in many things and people, and then from a peculiar frozen detachment that he practiced as one might practice the piano, or a foot position in ballet. Cultivated in this manner, his powers of absorption in a subject became very nearly absolute, and his memory was already remarkable, particularly in its re-creation of small details. He possessed to an unusual degree this ability to encapsulate himself with his subject, whatever or whoever it might be, so that nothing else existed except him and the other; and then he, himself, would begin to fade away and words would appear in his place: words concerning the subject, as though it were dictating itself. ~ James Dickey,#NFDB
505:The Ballet Of The Fifth Year
Where the sea gulls sleep or indeed where they fly
Is a place of different traffic. Although I
Consider the fishing bay (where I see them dip and curve
And purely glide) a place that weakens the nerve
Of will, and closes my eyes, as they should not be
(They should burn like the street-light all night quietly,
So that whatever is present will be known to me),
Nevertheless the gulls and the imagination
Of where they sleep, which comes to creation
In strict shape and color, from their dallying
Their wings slowly, and suddenly rallying
Over, up, down the arabesque of descent,
Is an old act enacted, my fabulous intent
When I skated, afraid of policemen, five years old,
In the winter sunset, sorrowful and cold,
Hardly attained to thought, but old enough to know
Such grace, so self-contained, was the best escape to know.
~ Delmore Schwartz,#NFDB
506: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. ~ Antoine de Saint Exup ry, #NFDB
507: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. ~ Paulo Coelho,#NFDB
508:Who Am I?
I’m a creator, a visionary, a poet. I approach the world with the eyes of an artist, the ears of a musician, and the soul of a writer. I see rainbows where others see only rain, and possibilities when others see only problems. I love spring flowers, summer’s heat on my body, and the beauty of the dying leaves in the fall. Classical music, art museums, and ballet are sources of inspiration, as well as blues music and dim cafes. I love to write; words flow easily from my fingertips, and my heart beats rapidly with excitement as an idea becomes a reality on the paper in front of me. I smile often, laugh easily, and I weep at pain and cruelty. I'm a learner and a seeker of knowledge, and I try to take my readers along on my journey. I am passionate about what I do. I learned to dream through reading, learned to create dreams through writing, and learned to develop dreamers through teaching. I shall always be a dreamer. Come dream with me. ~ Sharon M Draper,#NFDB
509:Bella: "Why am I covered in feathers?"
Bella:"You… bit a pillow? Why?"
Bella: "You listen to me, Edward Cullen. I am not pretending anything for your sake, okay? I didn’t even know there was a reason to make you feel better until you started being all miserable. I’ve never been so happy in all my life – I wasn’t this happy when you decided that you loved me more than you wanted to kill me, or the first morning I woke up and you were there waiting for me… Not when I heard your voice in the ballet studio, or when you said ‘I do’ and I realized that, somehow, I get to keep you forever. Those are the happiest memories I have, and this is better than any of it. So just deal with it."
Edward: "We’re just lucky it was the pillows and not you."
Edward: "You are making me insane, Bella."
Edward: "You are so human, Bella. Ruled by your hormones."
Edward :"So you seduced your all-too-willing husband. That’s not a capital offense. ~ Stephenie Meyer,#NFDB
510:I was thinking about Leon and our affinity for busyness, when I happened upon a book called In Praise of Slowness, written by Carl Honoré. In that book he describes a New Yorker cartoon that illustrates our dilemma. Two little girls are standing at a school-bus stop, each clutching a personal planner. One says to the other, “Okay, I’ll move ballet back an hour, reschedule gymnastics, and cancel piano. You shift your violin lessons to Thursday and skip soccer practice. That gives us from 3:15 to 3:45 on Wednesday the sixteenth to play.” This, I suppose, is how the madness starts. Pay close attention to the words Honoré uses to describe this fast-life/slow-life dichotomy. “Fast is busy, controlling, aggressive, hurried, analytical, stressed, superficial, impatient, active, quantity-over-quality. Slow is the opposite: calm, careful, receptive, intuitive, unhurried, patient, reflective, quality-over-quantity…. It is seeking to live at what musicians call the tempo giusto—the right speed.”* Which of those lifestyles would you prefer? ~ Philip Gulley, #NFDB
511:HDC, so she had danced some of the most important roles. Then, after retiring from dancing, she’d become the ballet mistress at HDC. Ms. Ferri was so nice that I couldn’t help wishing she taught ballet at my school, Anna Hart School of the Arts, so that I could have her all week instead of just on the weekends. But Ms. Ferri was too busy conducting the daily class for the HDC’s professional dancers. And this year, she was busy rehearsing her own role in The Nutcracker, too—the role of Mother Ginger. Ms. Ferri’s stilts were made out of metal rods about a yard high. In New York City Ballet’s version of The Nutcracker, men played Mother Ginger because the costume was so big and heavy. But Ms. Ferri was tall and strong enough to handle it. After years of playing Mother Ginger, she was a pro at managing the costume’s weight while she walked on stilts. No one would see the stilts, because she’d wear a skirt big enough to hide them—plus eight kids. Ms. Ferri glanced my way when she heard the door to the studio close behind me. “Where have you been, Isabelle? ~ Laurence Yep, #NFDB
512:Doctor Benway is operating in an auditorium filled with students: "Now, boys, you won't see this operation performed very often and there's a reason for that ... You see it has absolutely no medical value. No one knows what the purpose of it originally was or if it had a purpose at all. Personally I think it was a pure artistic creation from the beginning. Just as a bull fighter with his skill and knowledge extricates himself from danger he has himself invoked, so in this operation the surgeon deliberately endangers his patient, and then, with incredible speed and celerity, rescues him from death at the last possible split second ...
"Did any of you ever see Doctor Tetrazzini perform? I say perform advisedly because his operations were performances. He would start by throwing a scalpel across the room into the patient and then make his entrance like a ballet dancer. His speed was incredible: `I don't give them time to die,' he would say. Tumors put him in a frenzy of rage. `Fucking undisciplined cells!' he would snarl, advancing on the tumor like a knife-fighter. ~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
513:Utiliza metáforas. Las metáforas son comparaciones figuradas que transmiten el significado de tu causa. Por ejemplo, el anuncio de Johnson & Johnson de las tiritas era «Saluda al nuevo guardaespaldas de tu hijo». La utilización de la palabra «guardaespaldas» transmitía que el producto era fuerte y que tu hijo era alguien muy valioso. Utiliza símiles. Los símiles son comparaciones de dos cosas introducidas por «como» o «tanto como», pero que en la mayoría de los aspectos son distintas. Por ejemplo, «tomar drogas es como jugar con fuego», o «el hockey es como la guerra y el ballet». Estos símiles dan un punto de partida para que la gente entienda lo que estás comunicando desde algo que les resulta familiar. Mantén la brevedad. ¿Puedes superar el mensaje «tienes leche» o el famoso «Just do it» como eslóganes? Las frases breves son memorables y repetibles. He aquí una guía de la brevedad adecuada en los más actuales medios de comunicación: – Correo electrónico: cinco párrafos. – Vídeo: sesenta segundos. – PowerPoint y Keynote: diez diapositivas. – Planes de negocio: veinte páginas. ~ Guy Kawasaki, #NFDB
514:To The Art Of Edgar Degas
Beachcomber on the shores of tears
Limning the gestures of defeat
In dancers, whores, and opera-stars –
The lonely, lighted various street
You sauntered through, oblique, perverse,
In your home territory a spy,
Accosted you and with a curse
You froze it with your Gorgon’s eye.
With what tense patience you refine
The everyness of everyday
And with free colour and a line
Make my mysteries of flaccid clay!
By what strange enterprise you live!
Edgy, insatiably alone,
You choose your tenderness to give
To showgirls whom you turn to stone –
But stone that moves, tired stone that leans
To ease involuntarily the toe
Of ballet-girls like watering-cans
(Those arguers at the bar) as though
In their brief pause you found relief
From posed dilemmas of the mindYour grudging aristocratic grief,
The wildcat cares of going blind.
Well, walk your evening streets and look
Each last eleven at the show:
The darkening pleasures you forsook
Look back like burning windows now.
~ David Campbell,#NFDB
515:Single parenting isn’t just being the only one to take care of your kid. It’s not about being able to “tap out” for a break or tag team bath- and bedtime; those were the least of the difficulties I faced. I had a crushing amount of responsibility. I took out the trash. I brought in the groceries I had gone to the store to select and buy. I cooked. I cleaned. I changed out the toilet paper. I made the bed. I dusted. I checked the oil in the car. I drove Mia to the doctor, to her dad's house. I drove her to ballet class if I could find one that offered scholarships and then drove her back home again. I watched every twirl, every jump, and every trip down the slide. It was me who pushed her on the swing, put her to sleep at night, kissed her when she fell. When I sat down, I worried. With the stress gnawing at my stomach, worrying. I worried that my paycheck might not cover bills that month. I worried about Christmas, still four months away. I worried that Mia's cough might become a sinus infection that would keep her out of day care... . I worried that I would have to reschedule work or miss it altogether. ~ Stephanie Land, #NFDB
516: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, #NFDB
517:studying ancient Egypt and I thought I’d like to see them, too. Rolling-Rosie’s hand waved back and forth. “Tell me, Rosie, where would you fly?” Mrs. Brisbane asked. “I’d fly out of my wheelchair, straight up to the sky. I’d keep flying all over the world, just like a bird!” Her eyes glowed with excitement. “Where would you go first?” Mrs. Brisbane asked. Rosie thought for a few seconds. “I think I’d like to see those pyramids, too.” Everyone’s ideas were so exciting! Just-Joey wanted to fly like a hawk to Africa, and Small-Paul wanted to fly to outer space in a space shuttle. That’s a LONG-LONG-LONG way to fly! Simon wanted to fly like a dragon to Italy because he likes Italian food. “Especially pizza!” he said. “I could use my fire-breathing to heat it up.” The whole class chuckled at that, including me! Kelsey wanted to fly like a butterfly to any place she could see a professional ballet. “I’m happy to see that your imaginations are working very well,” Mrs. Brisbane said. “Now I want you to continue the paragraph, describing exactly what you’d like to see on your trip and telling us why.” There was a groan from the back of the room. ~ Betty G Birney, #NFDB
518:I remember the only time I ever saw my mother cry. I was eating apricot pie.
I remember how much I used to stutter.
I remember the first time I saw television. Lucille Ball was taking ballet lessons.
I remember Aunt Cleora who lived in Hollywood. Every year for Christmas she sent my brother and me a joint present of one book.
I remember a very poor boy who had to wear his sister's blouse to school.
I remember shower curtains with angel fish on them.
I remember very old people when I was very young. Their houses smelled funny.
I remember daydreams of being a singer all alone on a big stage with no scenery, just one spotlight on me, singing my heart out, and moving my audience to total tears of love and affection.
I remember waking up somewhere once and there was a horse staring me in the face.
I remember saying "thank you" in reply to "thank you" and then the other person doesn't know what to say.
I remember how embarrassed I was when other children cried.
I remember one very hot summer day I put ice cubes in my aquarium and all the fish died.
I remember not understanding why people on the other side of the world didn't fall off. ~ Joe Brainard,#NFDB
519:For his son-in-law the Pope suffered no further spasms of morality. Rather, judging from Burchard’s diary, the last inhibitions, if any, dropped away. Two months after Alfonso’s death, the Pope presided over a banquet given by Cesare in the Vatican, famous in the annals of pornography as the Ballet of the Chestnuts. Soberly recorded by Burchard, fifty courtesans danced after dinner with the guests, “at first clothed, then naked.” Chestnuts were then scattered among candelabra placed on the floor, “which the courtesans, crawling on hands and knees among the candelabra, picked up, while the Pope, Cesare and his sister Lucrezia looked on.” Coupling of guests and courtesans followed, with prizes in the form of fine silken tunics and cloaks offered “for those who could perform the act most often with the courtesans.” A month later Burchard records a scene in which mares and stallions were driven into a courtyard of the Vatican and equine coupling encouraged while from a balcony the Pope and Lucrezia “watched with loud laughter and much pleasure.” Later they watched again while Cesare shot down a mass of unarmed criminals driven like the horses into the same courtyard. ~ Barbara W Tuchman, #NFDB
520:Someone got in trouble at ballet for dropping the f-bomb,” she says. Paul’s face falls. He looks over the counter and into his daughter’s face. “You dropped an f-bomb?” Hayley looks up into Kelly’s face, her brows furrowed. “I didn’t drop a bomb. I just called the teacher a fu—” Kelly slaps a hand over her mouth. “You don’t need to repeat it. We get the idea.” She looks at Paul. “Talk to her?” “We’ll talk about it,” he assures her. “Oh, and she has a recital next week!” She rushes out the door. “I’ll be there,” Paul says to her back. The door closes, and Paul sits down on his haunches in front of Hayley. “What did we say about that word?” She hangs her head and goes into her room. She comes back with a quarter and holds it up. Paul takes it and puts it in a jar on top of the fridge. I give him a crazy look. “The swear jar,” he whispers. “Every time she says a bad word, she has to put in a quarter. And if she catches me saying a bad word, I have to put in a quarter.” I see a ten-dollar bill in there. He laughs. “Sam paid in advance.” “I’m going to go broke,” I say. I do watch my mouth around Hayley, although that’s really the only time I even think about what a potty mouth I have. “Probably. ~ Tammy Falkner, #NFDB
521: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. ~ Thomas Pynchon, #NFDB
522:To write my essay I had to read books differently, without giving myself over to either fear or adoration. Because Burke had defended the British monarchy, Dad would have said he was an agent of tyranny. He wouldn't have wanted the book in the house. There was a thrill in trusting myself to read the words. I felt a similar thrill in reading Madison, Hamilton and Jay, especially on those occasions when I discarded their conclusions in favor of Burke's, or when it seemed to me that their ideas were not really different in substance, only in form. There were wonderful suppositions embedded in this method of reading: that books are not tricks, and that I was not feeble.”
― Tara Westover, Educated
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“The hill is paved with wild wheat. If the conifers and sagebrush are soloists, the wheat field is a corps de ballet, each stem following all the rest in bursts of movement, a million ballerinas bending, one after the other, as great gales dent their golden heads.”
― Tara Westover, Educated: A Memoir
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“But vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them. Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people. ~ Tara Westover,#NFDB
523:Nora On The Pavement
As Nora on the pavement
Dances, and she entrances the grey hour
Into the laughing circle of her power,
The magic circle of her glances,
As Nora dances on the midnight pavement;
Petulant and bewildered,
Thronging desires and longing looks recur,
And memorably re-incarnate her,
As I remember that old longing,
A footlight fancy, petulant and bewildered;
There where the ballet circles,
See her, but ah! not free her from the race
Of glittering lines that link and interlace;
This colour now, now that, may be her,
In the bright web of those harmonious circles.
But what are these dance-measures,
Leaping and joyous, keeping time alone
With Life's capricious rhythm, and all her own,
Life's rhythm and hers, long sleeping,
That wakes, and knows not why, in these dance-measures?
It is the very Nora;
Child, and most blithe, and wild as any elf,
And innocently spendthrift of herself,
And guileless and most unbeguiled,
Herself at last, leaps free the very Nora.
It is the soul of Nora,
Living at last, and giving forth to the night,
Bird-like, the burden of its own delight,
All its desire, and all the joy of living,
In that blithe madness of the soul of Nora.
~ Arthur Symons,#NFDB
524:Between the sleeping and the waking, it is there.
Between the rising and the resting, it is there.
It is always there.
It gnaws on my heart. It chews on my soul.
I turn aside and see it. I stop my ears and hear it. I cover myself and feel it.
There are no human words for what I mean.
It is the language of the bare bough and the cold stone, pronounced in the fell wind's sullen whisper and the metronomic drip-drip of the rain. It is the song the falling snow sings and the discordant clamour of sunlight ripped apart by the canopy and miserly filtered down.
It is what the unseeing eye sees. It is what the deaf ear heres.
It is the romantic ballad of death's embrace; the solemn hymn of offal dripping from bloody teeth; the lamentation of the bloated corpse rotting in the sun; the graceful ballet of maggots twisting in the ruins of God's temple.
Here in this gray land, we have no name. We are the carcasses reflected in the yellow eye.
Our bones are bleached within our skin; our empty sockets regard the crow.
Here in this shadow country, our tiny voices scratch like a fly's wing against unmoving air.
Ours is the language of imbeciles, the gibberish of idiots. The root and the vine have more to say than us. ~ Rick Yancey,#NFDB
525:Agnes shut her eyes, clenched her fists, opened her mouth and screamed.
It started low. Plaster dust drifted down from the ceiling. The prisms on the chandelier chimed gently as they shook.
It rose, passing quickly through the mysterious pitch at fourteen cycles per second where the human spirit begins to feel distinctly uncomfortable about the universe and the place in it of the bowels. Small items around the Opera House vibrated off shelves and smashed on the floor.
The note climbed, rang like a bell, climbed again. In the Pit, all the violin strings snapped, one by one.
As the tone rose, the crystal prisms shook in the chandelier. In the bar, champagne corks fired a salvo. Ice jingled and shattered in its bucket. A line of wine-glasses joined in the chorus, blurred around the rims, and then exploded like hazardous thistledown with attitude.
There were harmonics and echoes that caused strange effects. In the dressing-rooms the No. 3 greasepaint melted. Mirrors cracked, filling the ballet school with a million fractured images.
Dust rose, insects fell. In the stones of the Opera House tiny particles of quartz danced briefly...
Then there was silence, broken by the occasional thud and tinkle.
Nanny grinned.
'Ah,' she said, 'now the opera's over. ~ Terry Pratchett,#NFDB
526: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. ~ Pamela Paul,#NFDB
527:But he had never seen Myrna in practice...never that close up. He had been impressed and a little frightened by the contrast between seeing ballet on stange, where everyone seemed to either glide or mince effortlessly on the tips of their pointes. and seeing it from less than five feet away, with harsh daylight pouring in the floor-to-ceiling windows and no music- only the choreographer rythmically clapping his hands and yelling harsh criticisms. No praise, only criticisms. Their faces ran with sweat. Their leotards were wet with sweat. The room, as large and airy as it way, stank of sweat. Sleek muscles trembled and fluttered on the nervous edge of exhaustion. Corded tendons stood out like insulated cables. Throbbing veins popped out on foreheads and necks. Except for the choreographer's clapping and angry, hectoring shouts, the only sounds were the thrup-thud of ballet dancers on pointe moving across the floor and harsh, agonized panting for breath. Jack had suddenly realized that these dancers were not just earning a living, they were killing themselves. Most of all he remembered their expressions- all that exhausted concentration, all that pain... but transcending the pain, or at least creeping around its edges, he had seen joy. Joy was unmistakably what that look was, and it scared Jack because it had seemed inexplicable. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
528: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,#NFDB
529:He takes my hand and pulls me out onto the floor. He smiles down at me. “I can’t feel the beat to this kind of music.” He looks around at the other couples. I see my dad step onto the floor with the model who approached Logan, and I roll my eyes. Logan takes me in his arms, his hand holding mine. He pulls me close to him, just a breath away, not touching, and my heart starts to flutter. Will I ever get used to being with this man who makes me feel so perfect? He picks up the rhythm of the music by watching the other dancers. “You’re pretty good at this,” I say. He just smiles and shrugs. “Mom made us all take dance lessons when we were young. Paul did a year of ballet before he grew enough balls to tell her he wouldn’t do it anymore.” He chuckles. I’ll never enjoy a sound more than that of his laughter. When we first met, he didn’t speak at all. He started talking again for me, and it took him even longer to learn to laugh. Sometimes he can’t tell how loud he is, and he doesn’t alter his voice well enough for the situation. This is one of those times. My dad shoots me a glare. I look up at Logan and just smile. “What’s bothering you?” he asks. “Not a thing,” I say. And it’s not. I’d trade my right arm for his voice, if someone told me I had to choose between the two. Hearing his words, his laughter and his thoughts means the world to me. ~ Tammy Falkner, #NFDB
530:a brief history of art
Cave paintings. Clay then bronze statues. Then for about 1,400 years, people painted nothing except bold but rudimentary pictures of either the Virgin Mary and Child or the Crucifixion. Some bright spark realised that things in the distance looked smaller and the pictures of the Virgin Mary and the Crucifixion improved hugely. Suddenly everyone was good at hands and facial expression and now the statues were in marble. Fat cherubs started appearing, while elsewhere there was a craze for domestic interiors and women standing by windows doing needlework. Dead pheasants and bunches of grapes and lots of detail. Cherubs disappeared and instead there were fanciful, idealised landscapes, then portraits of aristocrats on horseback, then huge canvasses of battles and shipwrecks. Then it was back to women lying on sofas or getting out of the bath, murkier this time, less detailed then a great many wine bottles and apples, then ballet dancers. Paintings developed a certain splodginess - critical term - so that they barely resembled what they were meant to be. Someone signed a urinal, and it all went mad. Neat squares of primary colour were followed by great blocks of emulsion, then soup cans, then someone picked up a video camera, someone else poured concrete, and the whole thing became hopelessly fractured into a kind of confusing, anything-goes free for all. ~ David Nicholls,#NFDB
531:You did not do my homework assignment for me,” he said, grabbing the collage again and looking it over.
“I had insomnia,” I said. “I needed a creative activity.” Marlboro Man looked at me, seemingly unsure of whether to kiss me, thank me…or just tickle me some more.
I didn’t give him a chance. Instead I picked up the collage and took Marlboro Man on a tour so he’d be prepared for our appointment.
“Here’s a pack of cigarettes,” I said. “Because I used to smoke in college.”
“Uh-huh,” he answered. “I knew that.”
“And here’s a glass of white wine,” I continued. “Because…I love white wine.”
“Yes, I’ve noticed,” Marlboro Man answered. “But…won’t Father Johnson have a problem with that being on there?”
“Nah…,” I said. “He’s Episcopalian.”
“Got it,” he said.
I continued with my collage orientation, pointing out the swatch of my favorite shade of turquoise…the pug…the ballet shoe…the Hershey’s Kiss. He watched and listened intently, prepping himself for Father Johnson’s upcoming grilling. Gradually the earliness of the morning and the cozy warmth of my bedroom got the better of us, and before we knew it we’d sunk into the irresistible softness of my bed, our arms and legs caught in a tangled maze.
“I think I love you,” his raspy voice whispered, his lips nearly touching my ear. His arms wrapped even more tightly around my body, swallowing me almost completely. ~ Ree Drummond,#NFDB
532:she jerked the Prophet out from under Harry’s hand and unfolded it to look at the front page — “you should go and find Slughorn and start appealing to his better nature.” “Anyone we know — ?” asked Ron, as Hermione scanned the headlines. “Yes!” said Hermione, causing both Harry and Ron to gag on their breakfast. “But it’s all right, he’s not dead — it’s Mundungus, he’s been arrested and sent to Azkaban! Something to do with impersonating an Inferius during an attempted burglary . . . and someone called Octavius Pepper has vanished. . . . Oh, and how horrible, a nine-year-old boy has been arrested for trying to kill his grandparents, they think he was under the Imperius Curse. . . .” They finished their breakfast in silence. Hermione set off immediately for Ancient Runes; Ron for the common room, where he still had to finish his conclusion on Snape’s dementor essay; and Harry for the corridor on the seventh floor and the stretch of wall opposite the tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy teaching trolls to do ballet. Harry slipped on his Invisibility Cloak once he had found an empty passage, but he need not have bothered. When he reached his destination he found it deserted. Harry was not sure whether his chances of getting inside the room were better with Malfoy inside it or out, but at least his first attempt was not going to be complicated by the presence of Crabbe or Goyle pretending to be an eleven-year-old girl. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
533:I opened the front door of my parents’ house the next evening. His starched blue denim shirt caught my eye only seconds before his equally blue eyes did.
“Hello,” he said, smiling.
Those eyes. They were fixed on mine, and mine on his, for more seconds than is customary at the very beginning of a first date. My knees--the knees that had turned to rubber bands that night four months earlier in a temporary fit of illogical lust--were once again as firm as cooked spaghetti.
“Hello,” I answered. I was wearing sleek black pants, a violet V-necked sweater, and spiked black boots--a glaring contrast to the natural, faded denim ensemble he’d chosen. Fashionwise, we were hilariously mismatched. I could sense that he noticed this, too, as my skinny heels obnoxiously clomped along the pavement of my parents’ driveway.
We talked through dinner; if I ate, I wasn’t aware of it. We talked about my childhood on the golf course; about his upbringing in the country. About my dad, the doctor; about his dad, the rancher. About my lifelong commitment to ballet; about his lifelong passion for football. About my brother Mike; about his older brother, Todd, who had died when he was a teenager. About Los Angeles and celebrities; cows and agriculture. By the end of the evening, I had no idea what exactly I’d even said. All I knew was, I was riding in a Ford F250 diesel pickup with a cowboy--and there was nowhere else on earth I wanted to be. ~ Ree Drummond,#NFDB
534:Historic Evening
On an evening, for example, when the naive tourist has retired
from our economic horrors, a master's hand awakens
the meadow's harpsichord;
they are playing cards at the bottom of the pond,
mirror conjuring up favorites and queens;
there are saints, veils, threads of harmony,
and legendary chromatics in the setting sun.
He shudders as the hunts and hordes go by.
Comedy drips on the grass stages.
And the distress of the poor and of the weak
on those stupid planes! Before his slave's vision,
Germany goes scaffolding toward moons;
Tartar deserts light up; ancient revolts ferment
in the center of the Celestial Empire;
over stairways and armchairs of rock, a little world, wan and flat,
Africa and Occidents, will be erected.
Then a ballet of familiar seas and nights,
worthless chemistry and impossible melodies. The same bourgeois magic
wherever the mail-train sets you down.
Even the most elementary physicist feels that it is no longer possible
to submit to this personal atmosphere, fog of physical remorse,
which to acknowledge is already an affliction. No!
The moment of the seething cauldron, of seas removed,
of subterranean conflagrations, of the planet swept away,
and the consequent exterminations, certitudes indicated
with so little malice by the Bible and by the Norns
and for which serious persons should be on the alert
~ Arthur Rimbaud,#NFDB
535: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 that I felt the room grow warmer. I lost all sense of time. ~ Ruth Reichl,#NFDB
536:It infuriates him, this killing, this death. Infuriating that this is what we’re known for now, drug cartels and slaughter. This my city of Avenida 16 Septembre, the Victoria Theater, cobblestone streets, the bullring, La Central, La Fogata, more bookstores than El Paso, the university, the ballet, garapiñados, pan dulce, the mission, the plaza, the Kentucky Bar, Fred’s—now it’s known for these idiotic thugs. And my country, Mexico—the land of writers and poets—of Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, Elena Garro, Jorge Volpi, Rosario Castellanos, Luis Urrea, Elmer Mendoza, Alfonso Reyes—the land of painters and sculptors—Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Gabriel Orozco, Pablo O’Higgins, Juan Soriano, Francisco Goitia—of dancers like Guillermina Bravo, Gloria and Nellie Campobello, Josefina Lavalle, Ana Mérida, and composers—Carlos Chávez, Silvestre Revueltas, Agustín Lara, Blas Galindo—architects—Luis Barragán, Juan O’Gorman, Tatiana Bilbao, Michel Rojkind, Pedro Vásquez—wonderful filmmakers—Fernando de Fuentes, Alejandro Iñárritu, Luis Buñuel, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro—actors like Dolores del Río, “La Doña” María Félix, Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, Salma Hayek—now the names are “famous” narcos—no more than sociopathic murderers whose sole contribution to the culture has been the narcocorridas sung by no-talent sycophants. Mexico, the land of pyramids and palaces, deserts and jungles, mountains and beaches, markets and gardens, boulevards and cobblestoned streets, broad plazas and hidden courtyards, is now known as a slaughter ground. And for what? So North Americans can get high. ~ Don Winslow, #NFDB
537:For her, being an American was loathing America, but loving America was something he could not let go of any more than he could let go of loving his father and his mother, any more than he could have let go of his decency. How could she "hate" this country when she had no conception of this country? How could a child of his be so blind as to revile the "rotten system" that had given her own family every opportunity to succeed? To revile her "capitalist" parents as though their wealth were the product of anything other than the unstinting industry of three generations. The men of three generations, including even himself, slogging through the slime and stink of a tannery. The family that started out in a tannery, at one with, side by side with, the lowest of the low - now to her "capitalist dogs." There wasn't much difference and she knew it, between hating America and hating them. He loved the America she hated and blamed for everything that was imperfect in life and wanted violently to overturn, he loved the "bourgeois values" she hated and ridiculed and wanted to subvert, he loved the mother she hated and had all but murdered by doing what she did. Ignorant fucking bitch! The price they had paid! Why shouldn't he tear up this Rita Cohen letter? They were back! The sadistic mischief-makers with their bottomless talent for antagonism who had extorted from him the Audrey Hepburn scrapbook, the stuttering diary, and the ballet shoes, these delinquent young brutes calling themselves "revolutionaries" who had so viciously played with his hopes five years back had decided the time had again rolled around to laugh at Swede Levov. ~ Philip Roth, #NFDB
538:It was in her abode, in the janitorial quarters assigned her on the ground floor rear, that seemingly inoffensive Mrs. Shapiro set up a clandestine alcohol dispensary—not a speakeasy, but a bootleg joint, where the Irish and other shikkers of the vicinity could come and have their pint bottles filled up, at a price. And several times on weekends, when Ira was there, for he got along best with Jake, felt closest to him, because Jake was artistic, some beefy Irishman would come in, hand over his empty pint bottle for refilling, and after greenbacks were passed, and the transaction completed, receive as a goodwill offering a pony of spirits on the house. And once again those wry (rye? Out vile pun!), wry memories of lost opportunities: Jake’s drab kitchen where the two sat talking about art, about Jake’s favorite painters, interrupted by a knock on the door, opened by Mr. Shapiro, and the customer entered. With the fewest possible words, perhaps no more than salutations, purpose understood, negotiations carried out like a mime show, or a ballet: ecstatic pas de deux with Mr. McNally and Mr. Shapiro—until suspended by Mr. Shapiro’s disappearance with an empty bottle, leaving Mr. McNally to solo in anticipation of a “Druidy drunk,” terminated by Mr. Shapiro’s reappearance with a full pint of booze. Another pas de deux of payment? Got it whole hog—Mr. Shapiro was arrested for bootlegging several times, paid several fines, but somehow, by bribery and cunning, managed to survive in the enterprise, until he had amassed enough wealth to buy a fine place in Bensonhurst by the time “Prohibition” was repealed. A Yiddisher kupf, no doubt. ~ Henry Roth, #NFDB
539:Myrna was part of a ballet troupe and Jack had seen her and the other dancers perform—his mother often made him go with her and it was mostly boring stuff, like church or Sunrise Semester on TV. But he had never seen Myrna in practice . . . never that close up. He had been impressed and a little frightened by the contrast between seeing ballet on stage, where everyone seemed to either glide or mince effortlessly on the tips of their pointes, and seeing it from less than five feet away, with harsh daylight pouring in the floor-to-ceiling windows and no music—only the choreographer rhythmically clapping his hands and yelling harsh criticisms. No praise; only criticisms. Their faces ran with sweat. Their leotards were wet with sweat. The room, as large and airy as it was, stank of sweat. Sleek muscles trembled and fluttered on the nervous edge of exhaustion. Corded tendons stood out like insulated cables. Throbbing veins popped out on foreheads and necks. Except for the choreographer’s clapping and angry, hectoring shouts, the only sounds were the thrup-thud of ballet dancers on pointe moving across the floor and harsh, agonized panting for breath. Jack had suddenly realized that these dancers were not just earning a living; they were killing themselves. Most of all he remembered their expressions—all that exhausted concentration, all that pain . . . but transcending the pain, or at least creeping around its edges, he had seen joy. Joy was unmistakably what that look was, and it had scared Jack because it had seemed inexplicable. What kind of person could get off by subjecting himself or herself to such steady, throbbing, excruciating pain? ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
540:Had I catalogued the downsides of parenthood, "son might turn out to be a killer" would never have turned up on the list. Rather, it might have looked something like this:
1. Hassle.
2. Less time just the two of us. (Try no time just the two of us.)
3. Other people. (PTA meetings. Ballet teachers. The kid's insufferable friends and their insufferable parents.)
4. Turning into a cow. (I was slight, and preferred to stay that way. My sister-in-law had developed bulging varicose veins in her legs during pregnancy that never retreated, and the prospect of calves branched in blue tree roots mortified me more than I could say. So I didn't say. I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.)
5. Unnatural altruism: being forced to make decisions in accordance with what was best for someone else. (I'm a pig.)
6. Curtailment of my traveling. (Note curtailment. Not conclusion.)
7. Dementing boredom. (I found small children brutally dull. I did, even at the outset, admit this to myself.)
8. Worthless social life. (I had never had a decent conversation with a friend's five-year-old in the room.)
9. Social demotion. (I was a respected entrepreneur. Once I had a toddler in tow, every man I knew--every woman, too, which is depressing--would take me less seriously.)
10. Paying the piper. (Parenthood repays a debt. But who wants to pay a debt she can escape? Apparently, the childless get away with something sneaky. Besides, what good is repaying a debt to the wrong party? Only the most warped mother would feel rewarded for her trouble by the fact that at last her daughter's life is hideous, too.) ~ Lionel Shriver,#NFDB
541:We have one collective hope: the Earth And yet, uncounted people remain hopeless, famine and calamity abound
Sufferers hurl themselves into the arms of war;
people kill and get killed in the name of someone else’s concept of God
Do we admit that our thoughts & behaviors spring from a belief that the world revolves around us? Each fabricated conflict, self-murdering bomb, vanished airplane, every fictionalized dictator, biased or partisan, and wayward son, are part of the curtains of society’s racial, ethnic, religious, national, and cultural conflicts, and you find the human ego turning the knobs and pulling the levers
When I track the orbits of asteroids, comets, and planets, each one a pirouetting dancer in a cosmic ballet, choreographed by the forces of gravity,
I see beyond the plight of humans
I see a universe ever-expanding,
with its galaxies embedded within the ever-stretching four-dimensional fabric of space and time
However big our world is, our hearts, our minds, our outsize atlases, the universe is even bigger
There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on the world’s beaches, more stars in the universe than seconds of time that have passed since Earth formed,
more stars than words & sounds ever uttered by all humans who have ever lived
The day we cease the exploration of the cosmos is the day we threaten the continuing of our species
In that bleak world, arms-bearing, resource-hungry people & nations would be prone to act on their low-contracted prejudices, and would have seen the last gasp of human enlightenment
Until the rise of a visionary new culture that once again embraces the cosmic perspective;
a perspective in which we are one, fitting neither above nor below, but within ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson,#NFDB
542:Blues
Elizabeth Alexander, 1962
I am lazy, the laziest
girl in the world. I sleep during
the day when I want to, ‘til
my face is creased and swollen,
‘til my lips are dry and hot. I
eat as I please: cookies and milk
after lunch, butter and sour cream
on my baked potato, foods that
slothful people eat, that turn
yellow and opaque beneath the skin.
Sometimes come dinnertime Sunday
I am still in my nightgown, the one
with the lace trim listing because
I have not mended it. Many days
I do not exercise, only
consider it, then rub my curdy
belly and lie down. Even
my poems are lazy. I use
syllabics instead of iambs,
prefer slant to the gong of full rhyme,
write briefly while others go
for pages. And yesterday,
for example, I did not work at all!
I got in my car and I drove
to factory outlet stores, purchased
stockings and panties and socks
with my father’s money.
To think, in childhood I missed only
one day of school per year. I went
to ballet class four days a week
at four-forty-five and on
Saturdays, beginning always
with plie, ending with curtsy.
To think, I knew only industry,
the industry of my race
and of immigrants, the radio
tuned always to the station
that said, Line up your summer
job months in advance. Work hard
and do not shame your family,
who worked hard to give you what you have.
There is no sin but sloth. Burn
to a wick and keep moving.
I avoided sleep for years,
up at night replaying
evening news stories about
nearby jailbreaks, fat people
who ate fried chicken and woke up
dead. In sleep I am looking
for poems in the shape of open
V’s of birds flying in formation,
or open arms saying, I forgive you, all. ~ Elizabeth Alexander,#NFDB
543:What’s the most frightening thing to a child? The pain of being the outsider, of looking ridiculous to others, of being teased or picked on in school. Every child burns with fear at the prospect. It’s a primal instinct: to belong. McDonald’s has surely figured this out—along with what specific colors appeal to small children, what textures, and what movies or TV shows are likely to attract them to the gray disks of meat. They feel no compunction harnessing the fears and unarticulated yearnings of small children, and nor shall I. “Ronald has cooties,” I say—every time he shows up on television or out the window of the car. “And you know,” I add, lowering my voice, “he smells bad, too. Kind of like … poo!” (I am, I should say, careful to use the word “alleged” each and every time I make such an assertion, mindful that my urgent whisperings to a two-year-old might be wrongfully construed as libelous.) “If you hug Ronald … can you get cooties?” asks my girl, a look of wide-eyed horror on her face. “Some say … yes,” I reply—not wanting to lie—just in case she should encounter the man at a child’s birthday party someday. It’s a lawyerly answer—but effective. “Some people talk about the smell, too… I’m not saying it rubs off on you or anything—if you get too close to him—but…” I let that hang in the air for a while. “Ewwww!!!” says my daughter. We sit in silence as she considers this, then she asks, “Is it true that if you eat a hamburger at McDonald’s it can make you a ree-tard? I laugh wholeheartedly at this one and give her a hug. I kiss her on the forehead reassuringly. “Ha. Ha. Ha. I don’t know where you get these ideas!” I may or may not have planted that little nugget a few weeks ago, allowing her little friend Tiffany at ballet class to “overhear” it as I pretended to talk on my cell phone. ~ Anthony Bourdain, #NFDB
544:As if on cue, Roo strolled out of the bakery, carrying a huge cinnamon roll in one hand and a giant cappuccino in the other. She wore a black taffeta miniskirt, black tights, black ballet slippers, and a black tank top over a purple T-shirt. Watching her a moment, Parker turned to the others and sighed.
“Look at her. Fashion Goddess of the Dark Realm.”
“She’s creative,” Ashley emphasized. “And her realm isn’t always a bad place to be.”
“Neither is hell. If you’re the Antichrist.”
This earned Parker a slug on the arm. Grinning, he pulled Ashley close and kissed her.
“Don’t even ask,” Roo announced as she joined them. “These are mine, and I’m not sharing.”
Gage promptly tore off a fourth of the cinnamon roll and popped it in his mouth. Etienne took a third of what was left. Roo stood there looking down at her practically empty napkin.
“You didn’t need that, anyway,” Ashley insisted. “All those calories.”
Parker gave Roo a serious once-over. “Since when has Roo cared about calories? No, wait. Since when has Roo cared about clothes? No, wait. Since when has Roo cared about how she looks?”
He stared at Gage. Gage stared at Etienne. Etienne stared at Parker.
“Since when has Roo cared about anything?” they all asked in unison.
Feeling a little envious, Miranda observed the good-natured teasing. The kids back home hadn’t shared this kind of camaraderie. Not that they hadn’t been close--their own special group of girls and guys--but what Miranda saw here was different.
Stronger, somehow.
Like a real family.
Miranda refocused on the three boys. Roo didn’t seem the least bit bothered by their comments. As Gage reached for the last bite of cinnamon roll, Roo stuffed it quickly into her mouth. Etienne just as quickly snatched the cappuccino from her other hand. ~ Richie Tankersley Cusick,#NFDB
545:As far as Serge can tell, Sophie only takes breakfast, and doesn’t even seem to eat that: each time he visits her lab over the next few days he sees sandwiches piled up virtually untouched beside glasses of lemonade that, no more than sipped at, are growing viscid bubbles on their surface like Aphrophora spumaria. Above these, on the wall, the texts, charts and diagrams are growing, spreading. Serge reads, for example, a report on the branchiae of Cercopidida, which are, apparently, “extremely tenuous, appearing like clusters of filaments forming lamellate appendages,” and scrutinises the architecture of Vespa germanica nests: their subterranean shafts and alleyways, their space-filled envelopes and alveolae … Bizarrely, Sophie’s started interspersing among these texts and images the headlines she’s torn from each day’s newspapers. These clippings seem to be caught up in her strange associative web: they, too, have certain words and letters highlighted and joined to ones among the scientific notes that, Serge presumes, must correspond to them in some way or another. One of these reads “Serbia Unsatisfied by London Treaty”; another, “Riot at Paris Ballet.” Serge can see no logical connection between these events and Sophie’s studies; yet colours and lines connect them. Arching over all of these in giant letters, each one occupying a whole sheet of paper, crayon-shaded and conjoined by lines that run over the wall itself to other terms and letter-sequences among the sprawling mesh, is the word Hymenoptera. “Hymenoptera?” Serge reads. “What’s that? It sounds quite rude.” “Sting in the tail,” she answers somewhat cryptically. “The groups contain the common ancestor, but not all the descendants. Paraphyletic: it’s all connected.” She stares at her expanded chart for a long while, lost in its vectors and relays—then, registering his continued presence with a slight twitch of her head, tells him to leave once more. ~ Tom McCarthy, #NFDB
546:So, did you see that community center I was talking about?”
“What? Where?”
“We walked right past it, just before that grocery store. I mentioned it on the way to the city? You just drop in and take classes. They’ve got all sorts of stuff. I bet you can get a student rate, even.”
“But I’m not a student—”
“You’re young enough that they’ll assume—”
“—and how am I supposed to find the time to take dance classes, now that I’m the dessert?”
“I’m starting to really regret using that metaphor,” Silas says, grinning. “And let me explain something, Rosie.” He takes a swig of the coffee and presses his lips together, searching for words. “I’m from a long, long, long, long line of woodsmen. My brothers are all supertalented. They all built their own rooms. For god’s sake, Lucas built a freaking wooden hot tub in his bedroom with wooden monkeys pouring water into it.”
“Monkeys?”
“Don’t ask. Anyway, I can do some woodworking. I know my way around the forest, I can handle an ax better than most, I can make a tree grow where nothing else will, I can live off berries and hunt for my food, and I’ve known about the Fenris since I could crawl. I’m a woodsman, for all intents and purposes. But that doesn’t mean I live for it any more than the fact that you’re good at hunting means you have to live for that. So maybe breaking out of the hunting lifestyle for a few hours here and there will help you figure out if it’s really for you or not.”
I shake my head, confused as to why he’d even think that was possible. “I can’t just not hunt, Silas. So yeah, I take a few random classes, and what if I decide that I hate hunting and want to quit? That doesn’t mean I can. I owe Scarlett my life, and if she wants to cash in by having me spend my life hunting beside her, so be it. It’d kill her if she ever thought I wanted to quit.”
“Rosie,” Silas says quietly. “I’m not suggesting you drop your sister like a bad habit and take up intense ballet training. ~ Jackson Pearce,#NFDB
547:Men traveling alone develop a romantic vertigo. Bech had already fallen in love with a freckled embassy wife in Russia, a buck-toothed chanteuse in Rumania, a stolid Mongolian sculptress in Kazakhstan. In the Tretyakov Gallery he had fallen in love with a recumbent statue, and at the Moscow Ballet School with an entire roomful of girls. Entering the room, he had been struck by the aroma, tenderly acrid, of young female sweat. Sixteen and seventeen, wearing patchy practice suits, the girls were twirling so strenuously their slippers were unraveling. Demure student faces crowned the unconscious insolence of their bodies. The room was doubled in depth by a floor-to-ceiling mirror. Bech was seated on a bench at its base. Staring above his head, each girl watched herself with frowning eyes frozen, for an instant in the turn, by the imperious delay and snap of her head. Bech tried to remember the lines of Rilke that expressed it, this snap and delay:
did not the drawing remain/that the dark stroke of your eyebrow/swiftly wrote on the wall of its own turning?
At one point the teacher, a shapeless old Ukrainian lady with gold canines, a prima of the thirties, had arisen and cried something translated to Bech as, “No, no, the arms free, free!”
And in demonstration she had executed a rapid series of pirouettes with such proud effortlessness that all the girls, standing this way and that like deer along the wall, had applauded. Bech had loved them for that. In all his loves, there was an urge to rescue—to rescue the girls from the slavery of their exertions, the statue from the cold grip of its own marble, the embassy wife from her boring and unctuous husband, the chanteuse from her nightly humiliation (she could not sing), the Mongolian from her stolid race. But the Bulgarian poetess presented herself to him as needing nothing, as being complete, poised, satisfied, achieved. He was aroused and curious and, the next day, inquired about her of the man with the vaguely contemptuous mouth of a hare—a novelist turned playwright and scenarist, who accompanied him to the Rila Monastery. “She lives to write,” the playwright said. “I do not think it is healthy. ~ John Updike,#NFDB
548:I WANT TO end this list by talking a little more about the founding of Pixar University and Elyse Klaidman’s mind-expanding drawing classes in particular. Those first classes were such a success—of the 120 people who worked at Pixar then, 100 enrolled—that we gradually began expanding P.U.’s curriculum. Sculpting, painting, acting, meditation, belly dancing, live-action filmmaking, computer programming, design and color theory, ballet—over the years, we have offered free classes in all of them. This meant spending not only the time to find the best outside teachers but also the real cost of freeing people up during their workday to take the classes. So what exactly was Pixar getting out of all of this? It wasn’t that the class material directly enhanced our employees’ job performance. Instead, there was something about an apprentice lighting technician sitting alongside an experienced animator, who in turn was sitting next to someone who worked in legal or accounting or security—that proved immensely valuable. In the classroom setting, people interacted in a way they didn’t in the workplace. They felt free to be goofy, relaxed, open, vulnerable. Hierarchy did not apply, and as a result, communication thrived. Simply by providing an excuse for us all to toil side by side, humbled by the challenge of sketching a self-portrait or writing computer code or taming a lump of clay, P.U. changed the culture for the better. It taught everyone at Pixar, no matter their title, to respect the work that their colleagues did. And it made us all beginners again. Creativity involves missteps and imperfections. I wanted our people to get comfortable with that idea—that both the organization and its members should be willing, at times, to operate on the edge. I can understand that the leaders of many companies might wonder whether or not such classes would truly be useful, worth the expense. And I’ll admit that these social interactions I describe were an unexpected benefit. But the purpose of P.U. was never to turn programmers into artists or artists into belly dancers. Instead, it was to send a signal about how important it is for every one of us to keep learning new things. That, too, is a key part of remaining flexible: keeping our brains nimble by pushing ourselves to try things we haven’t tried before. That’s what P.U. lets our people do, and I believe it makes us stronger. ~ Ed Catmull, #NFDB
549:Harley Diekerhoff looked up from peeling potatoes to glance out the kitchen window. It was still snowing... even harder than it had been this morning. So much white, it dazzled. Hands still, breath catching, she watched the thick, white flakes blow past the ranch house at a dizzying pace, enthralled by the flurry of the lacy snowflakes. So beautiful. Magical A mysterious silent ballet in all white, the snow swirling, twirling just like it did in her favorite scene from the Nutcracker—the one with the Snow Queen and her breathtaking corps in their white tutus with their precision and speed—and then that dazzling snow at the end, the delicate flakes powdering the stage. Harley’s chest ached. She gripped the peeler more tightly, and focused on her breathing. She didn’t want to remember. She wasn’t going to remember. Wasn’t going to go there, not now, not today. Not when she had six hungry men to feed in a little over two hours. She picked up a potato, started peeling. She’d come to Montana to work. She’d taken the temporary job at Copper Mountain Ranch to get some distance from her family this Christmas, and working on the Paradise Valley cattle ranch would give her new memories. Like the snow piling up outside the window. She’d never lived in a place that snowed like this. Where she came from in Central California, they didn’t have snow, they had fog. Thick soupy Tule fog that blanketed the entire valley, socking in airports, making driving nearly impossible. And on the nights when the fog lifted and temperatures dropped beneath the cold clear sky, the citrus growers rushed to light smudge pots to protect their valuable, vulnerable orange crops. Her family didn’t grow oranges. Her family were Dutch dairy people. Harley had been raised on a big dairy farm in Visalia, and she’d marry a dairyman in college, and they’d had their own dairy, too. But that’s the part she needed to forget. That’s why she’d come to Montana, with its jagged mountains and rugged river valleys and long cold winters. She’d arrived here the Sunday following Thanksgiving and would work through mid-January, when Brock Sheenan’s housekeeper returned from a personal leave of absence. In January, Harley would either return to California or look for another job in Crawford County. Harley was tempted to stay, as the Bozeman employment agency assured her they’d have no problem finding her a permanent position if she wanted one. ~ Jane Porter, #NFDB
550:Tim Tigner began his career in Soviet Counterintelligence with the US Army Special Forces, the Green Berets. That was back in the Cold War days when, “We learned Russian so you didn't have to,” something he did at the Presidio of Monterey alongside Recon Marines and Navy SEALs. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, Tim switched from espionage to arbitrage. Armed with a Wharton MBA rather than a Colt M16, he moved to Moscow in the midst of Perestroika. There, he led prominent multinational medical companies, worked with cosmonauts on the MIR Space Station (from Earth, alas), chaired the Association of International Pharmaceutical Manufacturers, and helped write Russia’s first law on healthcare. Moving to Brussels during the formation of the EU, Tim ran Europe, Middle East, and Africa for a Johnson & Johnson company and traveled like a character in a Robert Ludlum novel. He eventually landed in Silicon Valley, where he launched new medical technologies as a startup CEO. In his free time, Tim has climbed the peaks of Mount Olympus, hang glided from the cliffs of Rio de Janeiro, and ballooned over Belgium. He earned scuba certification in Turkey, learned to ski in Slovenia, and ran the Serengeti with a Maasai warrior. He acted on stage in Portugal, taught negotiations in Germany, and chaired a healthcare conference in Holland. Tim studied psychology in France, radiology in England, and philosophy in Greece. He has enjoyed ballet at the Bolshoi, the opera on Lake Como, and the symphony in Vienna. He’s been a marathoner, paratrooper, triathlete, and yogi. Intent on combining his creativity with his experience, Tim began writing thrillers in 1996 from an apartment overlooking Moscow’s Gorky Park. Decades later, his passion for creative writing continues to grow every day. His home office now overlooks a vineyard in Northern California, where he lives with his wife Elena and their two daughters. Tim grew up in the Midwest, and graduated from Hanover College with a BA in Philosophy and Mathematics. After military service and work as a financial analyst and foreign-exchange trader, he earned an MBA in Finance and an MA in International Studies from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton and Lauder Schools. Thank you for taking the time to read about the author. Tim is most grateful for his loyal fans, and loves to correspond with readers like you. You are welcome to reach him directly at tim@timtigner.com. ~ Tim Tigner, #NFDB
551:My heart jumped. “Yes. Yes I do. Chris, go on to the Mayo Clinic without me. I’ll make out fine, and I swear not to marry anyone until you are back and give your approval. Worry about finding someone yourself. After all, I’m not the only woman who resembles our mother.”
He flared. “Why the hell do you put it like that? It’s you, not her! It’s everything about you that’s not like her that makes me need and want you so!
“Chris, I want a man I can sleep with, who will hold me when I feel afraid, and kiss me, and make me believe I am not evil or unworthy.”
My voice broke as tears came. “I wanted to show Momma what I could do, and be the best prima ballerina, but now that Julian’s gone all I want to do is cry when I hear ballet music. I miss him so, Chris.”
I put my head on his chest and sobbed. “I could have been nicer to him—then he wouldn’t have struck out in anger. He needed me and I failed him. You don’t need me. You’re stronger than he was. Paul doesn’t really need me either, or he would insist on marrying me right away. . . .”
“We could live together, and, and . . .” And here he faltered as his face turned red.
I finished for him, “No! Can’t you see it just wouldn’t work?”
“No, I guess it wouldn’t work for you,” he said stiffly. “But I’m a fool; I’ve always been a fool, wanting the impossible. I’m even fool enough to want us locked up again, the way we were—with me the only male available to you!”
“You don’t mean that!”
He seized me in his arms. “Don’t I? God help me but I do mean it! You belonged to me then, and in its own peculiar way our life together made me better than I would have been . . . and you made me want you, Cathy. You could have made me hate you, instead you made me love you.”
I shook my head, denying this; I’d only done what came naturally from watching my mother with men. I stared at him, trembling as he released me. I stumbled as I turned to run toward the house. Before me Paul loomed up! Startled I faltered guiltily and stared at him as he turned abruptly and strode in the opposite direction. Oh! He’d been watching and listening! I pivoted about, then raced back to where Chris had his head resting against the trunk of the oldest oak.
“See what you’ve done!” I cried out. “Forget me, Chris! I’m not the one and only woman alive!”
He appeared blind as he turned his head and he said, “You are for me the only woman alive. ~ V C Andrews,#NFDB
552:In our family, we live by the Hard Thing Rule. It has three parts. The first is that everyone—including Mom and Dad—has to do a hard thing. A hard thing is something that requires daily deliberate practice. I’ve told my kids that psychological research is my hard thing, but I also practice yoga. Dad tries to get better and better at being a real estate developer; he does the same with running. My oldest daughter, Amanda, has chosen playing the piano as her hard thing. She did ballet for years, but later quit. So did Lucy. This brings me to the second part of the Hard Thing Rule: You can quit. But you can’t quit until the season is over, the tuition payment is up, or some other “natural” stopping point has arrived. You must, at least for the interval to which you’ve committed yourself, finish whatever you begin. In other words, you can’t quit on a day when your teacher yells at you, or you lose a race, or you have to miss a sleepover because of a recital the next morning. You can’t quit on a bad day. And, finally, the Hard Thing Rule states that you get to pick your hard thing. Nobody picks it for you because, after all, it would make no sense to do a hard thing you’re not even vaguely interested in. Even the decision to try ballet came after a discussion of various other classes my daughters could have chosen instead. Lucy, in fact, cycled through a half-dozen hard things. She started each with enthusiasm but eventually discovered that she didn’t want to keep going with ballet, gymnastics, track, handicrafts, or piano. In the end, she landed on viola. She’s been at it for three years, during which time her interest has waxed rather than waned. Last year, she joined the school and all-city orchestras, and when I asked her recently if she wanted to switch her hard thing to something else, she looked at me like I was crazy. Next year, Amanda will be in high school. Her sister will follow the year after. At that point, the Hard Thing Rule will change. A fourth requirement will be added: each girl must commit to at least one activity, either something new or the piano and viola they’ve already started, for at least two years. Tyrannical? I don’t believe it is. And if Lucy’s and Amanda’s recent comments on the topic aren’t disguised apple-polishing, neither do my daughters. They’d like to grow grittier as they get older, and, like any skill, they know grit takes practice. They know they’re fortunate to have the opportunity to do so. For parents who would like to encourage grit without obliterating their children’s capacity to choose their own path, I recommend the Hard Thing Rule. ~ Angela Duckworth, #NFDB
553:The Feast Of Stephen
The coltish horseplay of the locker room,
Moist with the steam of the tiled shower stalls,
With shameless blends of civet, musk and sweat,
Loud with the cap-gun snapping of wet towels
Under the steel-ribbed cages of bare bulbs,
In some such setting of thick basement pipes
And janitorial realities
Boys for the first time frankly eye each other,
Inspect each others’ bodies at close range,
And what they see is not so much another
As a strange, possible version of themselves,
And all the sparring dance, adrenal life,
Tense, jubilant nimbleness, is but a vague,
Busy, unfocused ballet of self-love.
II
If the heart has its reasons, perhaps the body
Has its own lumbering sort of carnal spirit,
Felt in the tingling bruises of collision,
And known to captains as esprit de corps.
What is this brisk fraternity of timing,
Pivot and lobbing arc, or indirection,
Mens sana in men’s sauna, in the flush
Of health and toilets, private and corporal glee,
These fleet caroms, plies and genuflections
Before the salmon-leap, the leaping fountain
All sheathed in glistening light, flexed and alert?
From the vast echo-chamber of the gym,
Among the stumbled shouts and shrill of whistles,
The bounced basketball sound of a leather whip.
III
42
Think of those barren places where men gather
To act in the terrible name of rectitude,
Of acned shame, punk’s pride, muscle or turf,
The bully’s thin superiority.
Think of the Sturm-Abteilungs Kommandant
Who loves Beethoven and collects Degas,
Or the blond boys in jeans whose narrowed eyes
Are focussed by some hard and smothered lust,
Who lounge in a studied mimicry of ease,
Flick their live butts into the standing weeds,
And comb their hair in the mirror of cracked windows
Of an abandoned warehouse where they keep
In darkened readiness for their occasion
The rope, the chains, handcuffs and gasoline.
IV
Out in the rippled heat of a neighbor’s field,
In the kilowatts of noon, they’ve got one cornered.
The bugs are jumping, and the burly youths
Strip to the waist for the hot work ahead.
They go to arm themselves at the dry-stone wall,
Having flung down their wet and salty garments
At the feet of a young man whose name is Saul.
He watches sharply these superbly tanned
Figures with a swimmer’s chest and shoulders,
A miler’s thighs, with their self-conscious grace,
And in between their sleek, converging bodies,
Brilliantly oiled and burnished by the sun,
He catches a brief glimpse of bloodied hair
And hears an unintelligible prayer.
~ Anthony Evan Hecht,#NFDB
554:I jumped then. It seemed I heard a child laugh. My imagination, of course. And then, when I should have known better, I headed for the closet and the high and narrow door at the very back end and the steep and narrow dark stairs. A million times I’d ascended these stairs. A million times in the dark, without a candle, or a flashlight. Up into the dark, eerie, gigantic attic, and only when I was there did I feel around for the place where Chris and I had hidden our candles and matches.
Still there. Time did stand still in this place. We’d had several candle holders, all of pewter with small handles to grasp. Holders we’d found in an old trunk along with boxes and boxes of short, stubby, clumsily made candles. We’d always presumed them to be homemade candles, for they had smelled so rank and old when they burned.
My breath caught! Oh! It was the same! The paper flowers still dangled down, mobiles to sway in the drafts, and the giant flowers were still on the walls. Only all the colors had faded to indistinct gray—ghost flowers. The sparkling gem centers we’d glued on had loosened, and now only a few daisies had sequins, or gleaming stones, for centers. Carrie’s purple worm was there only now he too was a nothing color. Cory’s epileptic snail didn’t appear a bright, lopsided beach ball now, it was more a tepid, half-rotten squashy orange. The BEWARE signs Chris and I had painted in red were still on the walls, and the swings still dangled down from the attic rafters. Over near the record player was the barre Chris had fashioned, then nailed to the wall so I could practice my ballet positions. Even my outgrown costumes hung limply from nails, dozens of them with matching leotards and worn out pointe shoes, all faded and dusty, rotten smelling.
As in an unhappy dream I was committed to, I drifted aimlessly toward the distant schoolroom, with the candelight flickering. Ghosts were unsettled, memories and specters followed me as things began to wake up, yawn and whisper. No, I told myself, it was only the floating panels of my long chiffon wings . . . that was all. The spotted rocking-horse loomed up, scary and threatening, and my hand rose to my throat as I held back a scream. The rusty red wagon seemed to move by unseen hands pushing it, so my eyes took flight to the blackboard where I’d printed my enigmatic farewell message to those who came in the future. How was I to know it would be me?
We lived in the attic,
Christopher, Cory, Carrie and me—
Now there are only three.
Behind the small desk that had been Cory’s I scrunched down, and tried to fit my legs under. I wanted to put myself into a deep reverie that would call up Cory’s spirit that would tell me where he lay. ~ V C Andrews,#NFDB
555:Tony Williams: You’ve often mentioned that Tales of Hoffmann (1951) has been a major influence on you.
George Romero: It was the first film I got completely involved with. An aunt and uncle took me to see it in downtown Manhattan when it first played. And that was an event for me since I was about eleven at the time. The imagery just blew me away completely. I wanted to go and see a Tarzan movie but my aunt and uncle said, “No! Come and see a bit of culture here.” So I thought I was missing out. But I really fell in love with the film. There used to be a television show in New York called Million Dollar Movie. They would show the same film twice a day on weekdays, three times on Saturday, and three-to-four times on Sunday. Tales of Hoffmann appeared on it one week. I missed the first couple of days because I wasn’t aware that it was on. But the moment I found it was on, I watched virtually every telecast. This was before the days of video so, naturally, I couldn’t tape it. Those were the days you had to rent 16mm prints of any film. Most cities of any size had rental services and you could rent a surprising number of films. So once I started to look at Tales of Hoffmann I realized how much stuff Michael Powell did in the camera. Powell was so innovative in his technique. But it was also transparent so I could see how he achieved certain effects such as his use of an overprint in the scene of the ballet dancer on the lily ponds. I was beginning to understand how adept a director can be. But, aside from that, the imagery was superb. Robert Helpmann is the greatest Dracula that ever was. Those eyes were compelling. I was impressed by the way Powell shot Helpmann sweeping around in his cape and craning down over the balcony in the tavern. I felt the film was so unique compared to most of the things we were seeing in American cinema such as the westerns and other dreadful stuff I used to watch. Tales of Hoffmann just took me into another world in terms of its innovative cinematic technique. So it really got me going.
Tony Williams: A really beautiful print exists on laserdisc with commentary by Martin Scorsese and others.
George Romero: I was invited to collaborate on the commentary by Marty. Pat Buba (Tony’s brother) knew Thelma Schoonmaker and I got to meet Powell in later years. We had a wonderful dinner with him one evening. What an amazing guy! Eventually I got to see more of his movies that I’d never seen before such as I Know Where I’m Going and A Canterbury Tale. Anyway, I couldn’t do the commentary on Tales of Hoffmann with Marty. But, back in the old days in New York, Marty and I were the only two people who would rent a 16mm copy of the film. Every time I found it was out I knew that he had it and each time he wanted it he knew who had it! So that made us buddies. ~ George A Romero,#NFDB
556:The Bottle And The Bird
Once on a time a friend of mine prevailed on me to go
To see the dazzling splendors of a sinful ballet show,
And after we had reveled in the saltatory sights
We sought a neighboring cafe for more tangible delights;
When I demanded of my friend what viands he preferred,
He quoth: 'A large cold bottle and a small hot bird!'
Fool that I was, I did not know what anguish hidden lies
Within the morceau that allures the nostrils and the eyes!
There is a glorious candor in an honest quart of wine-A certain inspiration which I cannot well define!
How it bubbles, how it sparkles, how its gurgling seems to say:
'Come, on a tide of rapture let me float your soul away!'
But the crispy, steaming mouthful that is spread upon your plate-How it discounts human sapience and satirizes fate!
You wouldn't think a thing so small could cause the pains and aches
That certainly accrue to him that of that thing partakes;
To me, at least (a guileless wight!) it never once occurred
What horror was encompassed in that one small hot bird.
Oh, what a head I had on me when I awoke next day,
And what a firm conviction of intestinal decay!
What seas of mineral water and of bromide I applied
To quench those fierce volcanic fires that rioted inside!
And, oh! the thousand solemn, awful vows I plighted then
Never to tax my system with a small hot bird again!
The doctor seemed to doubt that birds could worry people so,
But, bless him! since I ate the bird, I guess I ought to know!
The acidous condition of my stomach, so he said,
Bespoke a vinous irritant that amplified my head,
And, ergo, the causation of the thing, as he inferred,
Was the large cold bottle, not the small hot bird.
Of course, I know it wasn't, and I'm sure you'll say I'm right
If ever it has been your wont to train around at night;
How sweet is retrospection when one's heart is bathed in wine,
And before its balmy breath how do the ills of life decline!
295
How the gracious juices drown what griefs would vex a mortal breast,
And float the flattered soul into the port of dreamless rest!
But you, O noxious, pigmy bird, whether it be you fly
Or paddle in the stagnant pools that sweltering, festering lie-I curse you and your evil kind for that you do me wrong,
Engendering poisons that corrupt my petted muse of song;
Go, get thee hence, and nevermore discomfit me and mine-I fain would barter all thy brood for one sweet draught of wine!
So hither come, O sportive youth! when fades the tell-tale day-Come hither with your fillets and your wreathes of posies gay;
We shall unloose the fragrant seas of seething, frothing wine
Which now the cobwebbed glass and envious wire and corks confine,
And midst the pleasing revelry the praises shall be heard
Of the large cold bottle, _not_ the small hot bird.
~ Eugene Field,#NFDB
557:Motor-scooter riders with big beards and girl friends who bounce on the back of the scooters and wear their hair long in front of their faces as well as behind, drunks who follow the advice of the Hat Council and are always turned out in hats, but not hats the Council would approve. Mr. Lacey, the locksmith,, shups up his shop for a while and goes to exchange time of day with Mr. Slube at the cigar store. Mr. Koochagian, the tailor, waters luxuriant jungle of plants in his window, gives them a critical look from the outside, accepts compliments on them from two passers-by, fingers the leaves on the plane tree in front of our house with a thoughtful gardener's appraisal, and crosses the street for a bite at the Ideal where he can keep an eye on customers and wigwag across the message that he is coming. The baby carriages come out, and clusters of everyone from toddlers with dolls to teenagers with homework gather at the stoops.
When I get home from work, the ballet is reaching its cresendo. This is the time roller skates and stilts and tricycles and games in the lee of the stoop with bottletops and plastic cowboys, this is the time of bundles and packages, zigzagging from the drug store to the fruit stand and back over to the butcher's; this is the time when teenagers, all dressed up, are pausing to ask if their slips shows or their collars look right; this is the time when beautiful girls get out of MG's; this is the time when the fire engines go through; this is the time when anybody you know on Hudson street will go by.
As the darkness thickens and Mr. Halpert moors the laundry cart to the cellar door again, the ballet goes under lights, eddying back nad forth but intensifying at the bright spotlight pools of Joe's sidewalk pizza, the bars, the delicatessen, the restaurant and the drug store. The night workers stop now at the delicatessen, to pick up salami and a container of milk. Things have settled down for the evening but the street and its ballet have not come to a stop.
I know the deep night ballet and its seasons best from waking long after midnight to tend a baby and, sitting in the dark, seeing the shadows and hearing sounds of the sidewalk. Mostly it is a sound like infinitely patterning snatches of party conversation, and, about three in the morning, singing, very good singing. Sometimes their is a sharpness and anger or sad, sad weeping, or a flurry of search for a string of beads broken. One night a young man came roaring along, bellowing terrible language at two girls whom he had apparently picked up and who were disappointing him. Doors opened, a wary semicircle formed around him, not too close, until police came. Out came the heads, too, along the Hudsons street, offering opinion, "Drunk...Crazy...A wild kid from the suburbs"
Deep in the night, I am almost unaware of how many people are on the street unless someone calls the together. Like the bagpipe. Who the piper is and why he favored our street I have no idea. ~ Jane Jacobs,#NFDB
558:The Duties Of An Aide-De-Camp
Oh, some folk think vice-royalty is festive and hilarious,
The duties of an A.D.C. are manifold and various,
So listen, whilst I tell in song
The duties of an aide-de-cong.
Whatsoever betide
To the Governor's side
We must stick -- or the public would eat him -For each bounder we see
Says, "Just introduce me
To His Lordship -- I'm anxious to meet him."
Then they grab at his paw
And they chatter and jaw
Till they'd talk him to death -- if we'd let 'em -And the folk he has met,
They are all in a fret,
Just for fear he might chance to forget 'em.
When some local King Billy
Is talking him silly,
Or the pound-keeper's wife has waylaid him,
From folks of that stamp
When he has to decamp -We're his aides to decamp -- so we aid him.
Then some feminine beauty
Will come and salute ye,
She may be a Miss or a Madam,
Or a man comes in view,
Bails you up, "How de do!"
And you don't know the fellow from Adam!
But you've got to keep sweet
With each man that you meet,
And a trifle like this mustn't bar you,
So you clutch at his fin,
And you say, with a grin,
"Oh, delighted to see you -- how are you?"
346
Then we do country shows
Where some prize-taker blows
Of his pig -- a great, vast forty-stoner -"See, my Lord! ain't he fine!
How is that for a swine!"
When it isn't a patch on its owner!
We fix up the dinners
For parsons and sinners
And lawyers and bishops and showmen,
And a judge of the court
We put next to a "sport",
And an Orangeman next to a Roman.
We send invitations
To all celebrations,
Some Nobody's presence entreating,
And the old folks of all
We invite to a ball,
And the young -- to a grandmothers' meeting.
And when we go dancing,
Like cart-horses prancing,
We plunge where the people are thickenkn';
And each gay local swell
Thinks it's "off" to dance well,
So he copies our style -- ain't it sickenin'!
Then at banquets we dine
And swig cheap, nasty wine,
But the poor aide-de-camp mustn't funk it -And they call it champagne,
But we're free to maintain
That he feels real pain when he's drunk it.
Then our horses bestriding
We go out a-riding
Lest our health by confinement we'd injure;
You can notice the glare
Of the Governor's hair
When the little boys say, "Go it, Ginger!"
347
Then some wandering lords -They so often are frauds -This out-of-way country invading,
If a man dresses well
And behaves like a swell,
Then he's somebody's cook masquerading.
But an out-an-out ass
With a thirst for the glass
And the symptoms of drink on his "boko",
Who is perpetually
Pursuing the ballet,
He is always the "true Orinoco".
We must slave with our quills -Keep the cash -- pay the bills -Keep account of the liquor and victuals -So I think you'll agree
That the gay A.D.C.
Has a life that's not all beer and skittles!
~ Banjo Paterson,#NFDB
559:Bullets
As bullets come to us they're thin,
They're angular, or smooth and fat,
Some spiral are, and gimlet in,
And some are sharp, and others flat.
The slim one pink you clean and neat,
The flat ones bat a solid blow
Much as a camel throws his feet,
And leave you beastly incomplete.
If lucky you don't know it through.
The flitting bullets flow and flock;
They twitter as they pass;
They're picking at the solid rock,
They're rooting in the grass.
A tiny ballet swiftly throws
Its gossamer of rust,
Brown fairies on their little toes
A-dancing in the dust.
You cower down when first they come
With snaky whispers at your ear;
And when like swarming bees they hum
You know the tinkling chill of fear.
A whining thing will pluck your heel,
A whirring insect sting your shin;
You shrink to half your size, and feel
The ripples o'er your body seal'Tis terror walking in your skin!
The bullets pelt like winter hail,
The whistle and they sigh,
They shrill like cordage in a gale,
Like mewing kittens cry;
They hiss and spit, they purring come;
Or, silent all a span,
They rap, as on a slackened drum,
The dab that kills a man.
Rage takes you next. All hot your face
36
The bitter void, and curses leap
From pincered teeth. The wide, still space
Whence all these leaden devil's sweep
Is Tophet. Fiends by day and night
Are groping for your heart to sate
In blood their diabolic spite.
You shoot in idiot delight,
Each winging slug a hymn of hate.
The futile bullets scratch and go,
They chortle and the coo.
I laugh my scorn, for now I know
The thing they cannot do.
They flit like midges in the sun,
But howso thick they be
What matter, since there is not one
That God has marked for me!
An Eastern old philosophy
Come home at length and passion stillsThe thing will be that is to be,
And all must come as Heaven wills.
Where in the swelter and the flame
The new, hot, shining bullets drip;
One in the many has an aim,
Inwove a visage and a nameNo man may give his fate the slip!
The bullets thrill along the breeze,
They drum upon the bags,
They tweak your ear, your hair they tease,
And peck your sleeve to rags.
Their voices may no more annoyI chortle at the call:
The bullet that is mine, my boy,
I shall not hear at all!
The war's a flutter very like
The tickets that we took from Tatt.
Quite possibly I'll make a strike;
The odds are all opposed to that.
Behind the dawn the Furies sway
37
The mighty globe from which to get
Those bullets which throughout the day
Will winners be to break or slay.
I have not struck a starter yet
The busy bullets rise and flock;
They whistle as they pass;
They're chipping at the solid rock,
They're skipping in the grass.
Out there the tiny dancers throw
Their sober skirts of rust,
Brown flitting figures tipping toe
Along the golden dust.
~ Edward George Dyson,#NFDB
560:On this way, they reached the roof. Christine tripped over it as lightly as a swallow. Their eyes swept the empty space between the three domes and the triangular pediment. She breathed freely over Paris, the whole valley of which was seen at work below. She called Raoul to come quite close to her and they walked side by side along the zinc streets, in the leaden avenues; they looked at their twin shapes in the huge tanks, full of stagnant water, where, in the hot weather, the little boys of the ballet, a score or so, learn to swim and dive.
The shadow had followed behind them clinging to their steps; and the two children little suspected its presence when they at last sat down, trustingly, under the mighty protection of Apollo, who, with a great bronze gesture, lifted his huge lyre to the heart of a crimson sky.
It was a gorgeous spring evening. Clouds, which had just received their gossamer robe of gold and purple from the setting sun, drifted slowly by; and Christine said to Raoul:
“Soon we shall go farther and faster than the clouds, to the end of the world, and then you will leave me, Raoul. But, if, when the moment comes for you to take me away, I refuse to go with you—well you must carry me off by force!”
“Are you afraid that you will change your mind, Christine?”
“I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head in an odd fashion. “He is a demon!” And she shivered and nestled in his arms with a moan. “I am afraid now of going back to live with him … in the ground!”
“What compels you to go back, Christine?”
“If I do not go back to him, terrible misfortunes may happen! … But I can’t do it, I can’t do it! … I know one ought to be sorry for people who live underground … But he is too horrible! And yet the time is at hand; I have only a day left; and, if I do not go, he will come and fetch me with his voice. And he will drag me with him, underground, and go on his knees before me, with his death’s head. And he will tell me that he loves me! And he will cry! Oh, those tears, Raoul, those tears in the two black eye-sockets of the death’s head! I can not see those tears flow again!”
She wrung her hands in anguish, while Raoul pressed her to his heart.
“No, no, you shall never again hear him tell you that he loves you! You shall not see his tears! Let us fly, Christine, let us fly at once!”
And he tried to drag her away, then and there. But she stopped him.
“No, no,” she said, shaking her head sadly. “Not now! … It would be too cruel … let him hear me sing to-morrow evening … and then we will go away. You must come and fetch me in my dressing-room at midnight exactly. He will then be waiting for me in the dining-room by the lake … we shall be free and you shall take me away … You must promise me that, Raoul, even if I refuse; for I feel that, if I go back this time, I shall perhaps never return.”
And she gave a sigh to which it seemed to her that another sigh, behind her, replied.
“Didn’t you hear?”
Her teeth chattered.
“No,” said Raoul, “I heard nothing.”
- Chapter 12: Apollo’s Lyre ~ Gaston Leroux,#NFDB
561:I used to think love was two people sucking
on the same straw to see whose thirst was stronger,
but then I whiffed the crushed walnuts of your nape,
traced jackals in the snow-covered tombstones of your teeth.
I used to think love was a non-stop saxophone solo
in the lungs, till I hung with you like a pair of sneakers
from a phone line, and you promised to always smell
the rose in my kerosene. I used to think love was terminal
pelvic ballet, till you let me jog beside while you pedaled
all over hell on the menstrual bicycle, your tongue
ripping through my prairie like a tornado of paper cuts.
I used to think love was an old man smashing a mirror
over his knee, till you helped me carry the barbell
of my spirit back up the stairs after my car pirouetted
in the desert. You are my history book. I used to not believe
in fairy tales till I played the dunce in sheep’s clothing
and felt how perfectly your foot fit in the glass slipper
of my ass. But then duty wrapped its phone cord
around my ankle and yanked me across the continent.
And now there are three thousand miles between the u
and s in esophagus. And being without you is like standing
at a cement-filled wall with a roll of Yugoslavian nickels
and making a wish. Some days I miss you so much
I’d jump off the roof of your office building
just to catch a glimpse of you on the way down. I wish
we could trade left eyeballs, so we could always see
what the other sees. But you’re here, I’m there,
and we have only words, a nightly phone call - one chance
to mix feelings into syllables and pour into the receiver,
hope they don’t disassemble in that calculus of wire.
And lately - with this whole war thing - the language machine
supporting it - I feel betrayed by the alphabet, like they’re
injecting strychnine into my vowels, infecting my consonants,
naming attack helicopters after shattered Indian tribes:
Apache, Blackhawk; and West Bank colonizers are settlers,
so Sharon is Davey Crockett, and Arafat: Geronimo,
and it’s the Wild West all over again. And I imagine Picasso
looking in a mirror, decorating his face in war paint,
washing his brushes in venom. And I think of Jenin
in all that rubble, and I feel like a Cyclops with two eyes,
like an anorexic with three mouths, like a scuba diver
in quicksand, like a shark with plastic vampire teeth,
like I’m the executioner’s fingernail trying to reason
with the hand. And I don’t know how to speak love
when the heart is a busted cup filling with spit and paste,
and the only sexual fantasy I have is busting
into the Pentagon with a bazooka-sized pen and blowing
open the minds of generals. And I comfort myself
with the thought that we’ll name our first child Jenin,
and her middle name will be Terezin, and we’ll teach her
how to glow in the dark, and how to swallow firecrackers,
and to never neglect the first straw; because no one
ever talks about the first straw, it’s always the last straw
that gets all the attention, but by then it’s way too late. ~ Jeffrey McDaniel,#NFDB
562:An hour later we were pulling into the hospital parking lot. Sparkly and shiny from my hair and makeup job, I had to stop and bend over six times between the car and the front door of the hospital. I literally couldn’t take a step until each contraction ended. Within an hour after checking in, I was writhing on a hospital bed in all-encompassing pain and wishing once again that I’d gone ahead and moved to Chicago. It had become my default response when things got rough in my life: morning sickness? I should have moved to Chicago. Cow manure in my yard? Chicago would have been a better choice. Contractions less than a minute apart? Windy City, come and get me.
Finally, I reached my breaking point. It’s an indescribable feeling, the throes of hard labor--that mind-numbing total body cramp whose origin you can’t even begin to wrap your head around. After trying to be strong and tough in front of Marlboro Man, I finally gave up and gripped the bedsheet and clenched my teeth. I groaned and moaned and pushed the nurse button and whimpered to Marlboro Man, “I can’t do this anymore.” When the nurse came into the room moments later, I begged her to put me out of my misery. My salvation arrived five minutes later in the form of an eight-inch needle, and when the medicine hit I nearly began to cry. The relief was indescribably sweet.
I was so blissfully pain-free, I fell asleep. And when I woke up confused and disoriented an hour later, a nurse named Heidi was telling me it was time to push. Almost immediately, Dr. Oliver entered the room, fully scrubbed and wearing a mask.
“Are you ready, Mama?” Marlboro Man asked, standing near my shoulders as the nurse draped my legs and adjusted the fetal monitor, which was strapped around my middle. I felt like I’d woken up in the middle of a party. But the weirdest party ever--one where the hostess was putting my feet in stirrups.
I ordered Marlboro Man to remain north of my belly button as nurses scurried into place. I’d made it clear beforehand: I didn’t want him down there. I wanted him to continue to get to know me the old-fashioned way--and besides, that’s what we were paying the doctor for.
“Go ahead and push once for me,” Dr. Oliver said.
I did, but only hard enough to ensure that nothing accidental or embarrassing would slip out. I could think of no greater humiliation.
“Okay, that’s not going to work at all,” Dr. Oliver scolded.
I pushed again.
“Ree,” Dr. Oliver said, looking up at me through the space between my legs. “You can do way better than that.”
He’d watched me grow up in the ballet company in our town. He’d watched me contort and leap and spin in everything from The Nutcracker to Swan Lake to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He knew I had the fortitude to will a baby from my loins.
That’s when Marlboro Man grabbed my hand, as if to impart to me, his sweaty and slightly weary wife, a measure of his strength and endurance.
“Come on, honey,” he said. “You can do it.”
A few tense moments later, our baby was born.
Except it wasn’t a baby boy. It was a seven-pound, twenty-one-inch baby girl.
It was the most important moment of my life.
And more ways than one, it was a pivotal moment for Marlboro Man. ~ Ree Drummond,#NFDB
563:Live or die, but don't poison everything...
Well, death's been here
for a long time --
it has a hell of a lot
to do with hell
and suspicion of the eye
and the religious objects
and how I mourned them
when they were made obscene
by my dwarf-heart's doodle.
The chief ingredient
is mutilation.
And mud, day after day,
mud like a ritual,
and the baby on the platter,
cooked but still human,
cooked also with little maggots,
sewn onto it maybe by somebody's mother,
the damn bitch!
Even so,
I kept right on going on,
a sort of human statement,
lugging myself as if
I were a sawed-off body
in the trunk, the steamer trunk.
This became perjury of the soul.
It became an outright lie
and even though I dressed the body
it was still naked, still killed.
It was caught
in the first place at birth,
like a fish.
But I play it, dressed it up,
dressed it up like somebody's doll.
Is life something you play?
And all the time wanting to get rid of it?
And further, everyone yelling at you
to shut up. And no wonder!
People don't like to be told
that you're sick
and then be forced
to watch
you
come
down with the hammer.
Today life opened inside me like an egg
and there inside
after considerable digging
I found the answer.
What a bargain!
There was the sun,
her yolk moving feverishly,
tumbling her prize --
and you realize she does this daily!
I'd known she was a purifier
but I hadn't thought
she was solid,
hadn't known she was an answer.
God! It's a dream,
lovers sprouting in the yard
like celery stalks
and better,
a husband straight as a redwood,
two daughters, two sea urchings,
picking roses off my hackles.
If I'm on fire they dance around it
and cook marshmallows.
And if I'm ice
they simply skate on me
in little ballet costumes.
Here,
all along,
thinking I was a killer,
anointing myself daily
with my little poisons.
But no.
I'm an empress.
I wear an apron.
My typewriter writes.
It didn't break the way it warned.
Even crazy, I'm as nice
as a chocolate bar.
Even with the witches' gymnastics
they trust my incalculable city,
my corruptible bed.
O dearest three,
I make a soft reply.
The witch comes on
and you paint her pink.
I come with kisses in my hood
and the sun, the smart one,
rolling in my arms.
So I say Live
and turn my shadow three times round
to feed our puppies as they come,
the eight Dalmatians we didn't drown,
despite the warnings: The abort! The destroy!
Despite the pails of water that waited,
to drown them, to pull them down like stones,
they came, each one headfirst, blowing bubbles the color of cataract-blue
and fumbling for the tiny tits.
Just last week, eight Dalmatians,
3/4 of a lb., lined up like cord wood
each
like a
birch tree.
I promise to love more if they come,
because in spite of cruelty
and the stuffed railroad cars for the ovens,
I am not what I expected. Not an Eichmann.
The poison just didn't take.
So I won't hang around in my hospital shift,
repeating The Black Mass and all of it.
I say Live, Live because of the sun,
the dream, the excitable gift. ~ Anne Sexton,#NFDB
564:During this same period of his life Bohm also continued to refine his alternative approach to quantum physics. As he looked more carefully into the meaning of the quantum potential he discovered it had a number of features that implied an even more radical departure from orthodox thinking. One was the importance of wholeness. Classical science had always viewed the state of a system as a whole as merely the result of the interaction of its parts. However, the quantum potential stood this view on its ear and indicated that the behavior of the parts was actually organized by the whole. This not only took Bohr's assertion that subatomic particles are not independent "things, " but are part of an indivisible system one step further, but even suggested that wholeness was in some ways the more primary reality. It also explained how electrons in plasmas (and other specialized states such as superconductivity) could behave like interconnected wholes. As Bohm states, such "electrons are not scattered because, through the action of the quantum potential, the whole system is undergoing a co-ordinated movement more like a ballet dance than like a crowd of unorganized people. " Once again he notes that "such quantum wholeness of activity is closer to the organized unity of functioning of the parts of a living being than it is to the kind of unity that is obtained by putting together the parts of a machine. "6 An even more surprising feature of the quantum potential was its implications for the nature of location. At the level of our everyday lives things have very specific locations, but Bohm's interpretation of quantum physics indicated that at the subquantum level, the level in which the quantum potential operated, location ceased to exist All points in space became equal to all other points in space, and it was meaningless to speak of anything as being separate from anything else. Physicists call this property "nonlocality. " The nonlocal aspect of the quantum potential enabled Bohm to explain the connection between twin particles without violating special relativity's ban against anything traveling faster than the speed of light. To illustrate how, he offers the following analogy: Imagine a fish swimming in an aquarium. Imagine also that you have never seen a fish or an aquarium before and your only knowledge about them comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium's front and the other at its side. When you look at the two television monitors you might mistakenly assume that the fish on the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch you will eventually realize there is a relationship between the two fish. When one turns, the other makes a slightly different but corresponding turn. When one faces the front, the other faces the side, and so on. If you are unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might wrongly conclude that the fish are instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is not the case. No communication is taking place because at a deeper level of reality, the reality of the aquarium, the two fish are actually one and the same. This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between particles such as the two photons emitted when a positronium atom decays (see fig. 8). ~ Michael Talbot, #NFDB
565:Live
Live or die, but don't poison everything…
Well, death's been here
for a long time it has a hell of a lot
to do with hell
and suspicion of the eye
and the religious objects
and how I mourned them
when they were made obscene
by my dwarf-heart's doodle.
The chief ingredient
is mutilation.
And mud, day after day,
mud like a ritual,
and the baby on the platter,
cooked but still human,
cooked also with little maggots,
sewn onto it maybe by somebody's mother,
the damn bitch!
Even so,
I kept right on going on,
a sort of human statement,
lugging myself as if
I were a sawed-off body
in the trunk, the steamer trunk.
This became perjury of the soul.
It became an outright lie
and even though I dressed the body
it was still naked, still killed.
It was caught
in the first place at birth,
like a fish.
But I play it, dressed it up,
dressed it up like somebody's doll.
Is life something you play?
And all the time wanting to get rid of it?
128
And further, everyone yelling at you
to shut up. And no wonder!
People don't like to be told
that you're sick
and then be forced
to watch
you
come
down with the hammer.
Today life opened inside me like an egg
and there inside
after considerable digging
I found the answer.
What a bargain!
There was the sun,
her yolk moving feverishly,
tumbling her prize and you realize she does this daily!
I'd known she was a purifier
but I hadn't thought
she was solid,
hadn't known she was an answer.
God! It's a dream,
lovers sprouting in the yard
like celery stalks
and better,
a husband straight as a redwood,
two daughters, two sea urchings,
picking roses off my hackles.
If I'm on fire they dance around it
and cook marshmallows.
And if I'm ice
they simply skate on me
in little ballet costumes.
Here,
all along,
thinking I was a killer,
anointing myself daily
with my little poisons.
But no.
129
I'm an empress.
I wear an apron.
My typewriter writes.
It didn't break the way it warned.
Even crazy, I'm as nice
as a chocolate bar.
Even with the witches' gymnastics
they trust my incalculable city,
my corruptible bed.
O dearest three,
I make a soft reply.
The witch comes on
and you paint her pink.
I come with kisses in my hood
and the sun, the smart one,
rolling in my arms.
So I say Live
and turn my shadow three times round
to feed our puppies as they come,
the eight Dalmatians we didn't drown,
despite the warnings: The abort! The destroy!
Despite the pails of water that waited,
to drown them, to pull them down like stones,
they came, each one headfirst, blowing bubbles the color of cataract-blue
and fumbling for the tiny tits.
Just last week, eight Dalmatians,
3/4 of a lb., lined up like cord wood
each
like a
birch tree.
I promise to love more if they come,
because in spite of cruelty
and the stuffed railroad cars for the ovens,
I am not what I expected. Not an Eichmann.
The poison just didn't take.
So I won't hang around in my hospital shift,
repeating The Black Mass and all of it.
I say Live, Live because of the sun,
the dream, the excitable gift.
130
~ Anne Sexton,#NFDB
566:Nights On Planet Earth
Heaven was originally precisely that: the starry sky, dating back to the earliest
Egyptian texts, which include magic spells that enable the soul to be sewn in the
body of the great mother, Nut, literally 'night,' like the seed of a plant, which is
also a jewel and a star. The Greek Elysian fields derive from the same celestial
topography: the Egyptian 'Field of Rushes,' the eastern stars at dawn where the
soul goes to be purified. That there is another, mirror world, a world of light, and
that this world is simply the sky—and a step further, the breath of the sky, the
weather, the very air—is a formative belief of great antiquity that has continued
to the present day with the godhead becoming brightness itself: dios/theos
(Greek); deus/divine/diana (Latin); devas (Sanskrit); daha (Arabic); day
(English).
—Susan Brind Morrow, Wolves and Honey
Gravel paths on hillsides amid moon-drawn vineyards,
click of pearls upon a polished nightstand
soft as rainwater, self-minded stars, oboe music
distant as the grinding of icebergs against the hull
of the self and the soul in the darkness
chanting to the ecstatic chance of existence.
Deep is the water and long is the moonlight
inscribing addresses in quicksilver ink,
building the staircase a lover forever pauses upon.
Deep is the darkness and long is the night,
solid the water and liquid the light. How strange
that they arrive at all, nights on planet earth.
Sometimes, not often but repeatedly, the past invades my dreams in the form of
a familiar neighborhood I can no longer locate,
a warren of streets lined with dark cafés and unforgettable bars, a place where I
can sing by heart every song on every jukebox,
a city that feels the way the skin of an octopus looks pulse-changing from color
to color, laminar and fluid and electric,
a city of shadow-draped churches, of busses on dim avenues, or riverlights, or
canyonlands, but always a city, and wonderful, and lost.
Sometimes it resembles Amsterdam, students from the ballet school like fanciful
15
gazelles shooting pool in pink tights and soft, shapeless sweaters,
or Madrid at 4AM, arguing the 18th Brumaire with angry Marxists, or Manhattan
when the snowfall crowns every trash-can king of its Bowery stoop,
or Chicago, or Dublin, or some ideal city of the imagination, as in a movie you
can neither remember entirely nor completely forget,
barracuda-faced men drinking sake like yakuza in a Harukami novel, women
sipping champagne or arrack, the rattle of beaded curtains in the back,
the necklaces of Christmas lights reflected in raindrops on windows, the taste of
peanuts and their shells crushed to powder underfoot,
always real, always elusive, always a city, and wonderful, and lost. All night I
wander alone, searching in vain for the irretrievable.
In
In
In
In
In
In
In
In
the
the
the
the
the
the
the
the
night
night
night
night
night
night
night
night
will
will
will
will
will
will
will
will
drink from a cup of ashes and yellow paint.
gossip with the clouds and grow strong.
cross rooftops to watch the sea tremble in a dream.
assemble my army of golden carpenter ants.
walk the towpath among satellites and cosmic dust.
cry to the roots of potted plants in empty offices.
gather the feathers of pigeons in a honey jar.
become an infant before your flag.
~ Campbell McGrath,#NFDB
567:The history of the land is a history of blood.
In this history, someone wins and someone loses. There are patriots and enemies. Folk heroes who save the day. Vanquished foes who had it coming.
It’s all in the telling.
The conquered have no voice. Ask the thirty-eight Santee Sioux singing the death song with the nooses around their necks, the treaty signed fair and square, then nullified with a snap of the rope. Ask the slave women forced to bear their masters’ children, to raise and love them and see them sold. Ask the miners slaughtered by the militia in Ludlow.
Names are erased. The conqueror tells the story. The colonizer writes the history, winning twice: A theft of land. A theft of witness.
Oh, but let’s not speak of such things! Look: Here is an eagle whipping above the vast grasslands where the buffalo once thundered bold as gods. (The buffalo are here among the dead. So many buffalo.) There is the Declaration in sepia. (Signed by slave owners. Shhh, hush up about that, now!) See how the sun shines down upon the homesteaders’ wagons racing toward a precious claim in the nation’s future, the pursuit of happiness pursued without rest, destiny made manifest? (Never mind about those same homesteaders eating the flesh of neighbors. Winters are harsh in this country. Pack a snack.)
The history is a hungry history. Its mouth opens wide to consume. It must be fed. Bring me what you would forget, it cries, and I will swallow it whole and pull out the bones bleached of truth upon which you will hang the myths of yourselves. Feed me your pain and I will give you dreams and denial, a balm in Gilead. The land remembers everything, though. It knows the steps of this nation’s ballet of violence and forgetting.
The land receives our dead, and the dead sing softly the song of us: blood. Blood on the plains. In the rivers. On the trees where the ropes swing. Blood on the leaves. Blood under the flowers of Gettysburg, of Antioch. Blood on the auction blocks. Blood of the Lenape, the Cherokee, the Cheyenne. Blood of the Alamo. Blood of the Chinese railroad workers. Blood of the midwives hung for witchcraft, for the crime of being women who bleed. Blood of the immigrants fleeing the hopeless, running toward the open arms of the nation’s seductive hope, its greatest export. Blood of the first removed to make way for the cities, the factories, the people and their unbridled dreams: The chugging of the railways. The tapping of the telegram. The humming of industry. Sound burbling along telephone wires. Printing presses whirring with the day’s news. And the next day’s. And the day after that’s. Endless cycles of information. Cities brimming with ambitions used and discarded.
The dead hold what the people throw away. The stories sink the tendrils of their hope and sorrow down into the graves and coil around the dead buried there, deep in its womb.
All passes away, the dead whisper. Except for us. We, the eternal. Always here. Always listening. Always seeing.
One nation, under the earth. E Pluribus unum mortuis.
Oh, how we wish we could reach you! You dreamers and schemers! Oh, you children of optimism! You pioneers! You stars and stripes, forever! Sometimes, the dreamers wake as if they have heard. They take to the streets. They pick up the plow, the pen, the banner, the promise. They reach out to neighbors. They reach out to strangers. Backs stooped from a hard day’s labor, two men, one black, one white, share water from a well. They are thirsty and, in this one moment, thirst and work make them brothers. They drink of shared trust, that all men are created equal. They wipe their brows and smile up at a faithful sun. ~ Libba Bray,#NFDB
568:Little Brother, an aspiring painter, saved up all his money and went to France, to surround himself with beauty and inspiration. He lived on the cheap, painted every day, visited museums, traveled to picturesque locations, bravely spoke to everyone he met, and showed his work to anyone who would look at it. One afternoon, Little Brother struck up a conversation in a café with a group of charming young people, who turned out to be some species of fancy aristocrats. The charming young aristocrats took a liking to Little Brother and invited him to a party that weekend in a castle in the Loire Valley. They promised Little Brother that this was going to be the most fabulous party of the year. It would be attended by the rich, by the famous, and by several crowned heads of Europe. Best of all, it was to be a masquerade ball, where nobody skimped on the costumes. It was not to be missed. Dress up, they said, and join us! Excited, Little Brother worked all week on a costume that he was certain would be a showstopper. He scoured Paris for materials and held back neither on the details nor the audacity of his creation. Then he rented a car and drove to the castle, three hours from Paris. He changed into his costume in the car and ascended the castle steps. He gave his name to the butler, who found him on the guest list and politely welcomed him in. Little Brother entered the ballroom, head held high. Upon which he immediately realized his mistake. This was indeed a costume party—his new friends had not misled him there—but he had missed one detail in translation: This was a themed costume party. The theme was “a medieval court.” And Little Brother was dressed as a lobster. All around him, the wealthiest and most beautiful people of Europe were attired in gilded finery and elaborate period gowns, draped in heirloom jewels, sparkling with elegance as they waltzed to a fine orchestra. Little Brother, on the other hand, was wearing a red leotard, red tights, red ballet slippers, and giant red foam claws. Also, his face was painted red. This is the part of the story where I must tell you that Little Brother was over six feet tall and quite skinny—but with the long waving antennae on his head, he appeared even taller. He was also, of course, the only American in the room. He stood at the top of the steps for one long, ghastly moment. He almost ran away in shame. Running away in shame seemed like the most dignified response to the situation. But he didn’t run. Somehow, he found his resolve. He’d come this far, after all. He’d worked tremendously hard to make this costume, and he was proud of it. He took a deep breath and walked onto the dance floor. He reported later that it was only his experience as an aspiring artist that gave him the courage and the license to be so vulnerable and absurd. Something in life had already taught him to just put it out there, whatever “it” is. That costume was what he had made, after all, so that’s what he was bringing to the party. It was the best he had. It was all he had. So he decided to trust in himself, to trust in his costume, to trust in the circumstances. As he moved into the crowd of aristocrats, a silence fell. The dancing stopped. The orchestra stuttered to a stop. The other guests gathered around Little Brother. Finally, someone asked him what on earth he was. Little Brother bowed deeply and announced, “I am the court lobster.” Then: laughter. Not ridicule—just joy. They loved him. They loved his sweetness, his weirdness, his giant red claws, his skinny ass in his bright spandex tights. He was the trickster among them, and so he made the party. Little Brother even ended up dancing that night with the Queen of Belgium. This is how you must do it, people. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
569:Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations.
The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet. I make my own first entrance into it a little after eight when I put out my garbage gcan, surely a prosaic occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang, as the junior droves of junior high school students walk by the center of the stage dropping candy wrapper. (How do they eat so much candy so early in the morning?)
While I sweep up the wrappers I watch the other rituals of the morning: Mr Halpert unlocking the laundry's handcart from its mooring to a cellar door, Joe Cornacchia's son-in-law stacking out the empty crates from the delicatessen, the barber bringing out his sidewalk folding chair, Mr. Goldstein arranging the coils of wire which proclaim the hardware store is open, the wife of the tenement's super intendent depositing her chunky three-year-old with a toy mandolin on the stoop, the vantage point from which he is learning English his mother cannot speak. Now the primary childrren, heading for St. Luke's, dribble through the south; the children from St. Veronica\s cross, heading to the west, and the children from P.S 41, heading toward the east. Two new entrances are made from the wings: well-dressed and even elegant women and men with brief cases emerge from doorways and side streets. Most of these are heading for the bus and subways, but some hover on the curbs, stopping taxis which have miraculously appeared at the right moment, for the taxis are part of a wider morning ritual: having dropped passengers from midtown in the downtown financial district, they are now bringing downtowners up tow midtown. Simultaneously, numbers of women in housedresses have emerged and as they crisscross with one another they pause for quick conversations that sound with laughter or joint indignation, never, it seems, anything in between. It is time for me to hurry to work too, and I exchange my ritual farewell with Mr. Lofaro, the short, thick bodied, white-aproned fruit man who stands outside his doorway a little up the street, his arms folded, his feet planted, looking solid as the earth itself. We nod; we each glance quickly up and down the street, then look back at eachother and smile. We have done this many a morning for more than ten years, and we both know what it means: all is well.
The heart of the day ballet I seldom see, because part off the nature of it is that working people who live there, like me, are mostly gone, filling the roles of strangers on other sidewalks. But from days off, I know enough to know that it becomes more and more intricate. Longshoremen who are not working that day gather at the White Horse or the Ideal or the International for beer and conversation. The executives and business lunchers from the industries just to the west throng the Dorgene restaurant and the Lion's Head coffee house; meat market workers and communication scientists fill the bakery lunchroom. ~ Jane Jacobs,#NFDB
570:I. THE FLOWER'S NAME
Here's the garden she walked across,
Arm in my arm, such a short while since:
Hark, now I push its wicket, the moss
Hinders the hinges and makes them wince!
She must have reached this shrub ere she turned,
As back with that murmur the wicket swung;
For she laid the poor snail, my chance foot spurned,
To feed and forget it the leaves among.
II.
Down this side of the gravel-walk
She went while her rope's edge brushed the box:
And here she paused in her gracious talk
To point me a moth on the milk-white phlox.
Roses, ranged in valiant row,
I will never think that she passed you by!
She loves you noble roses, I know;
But yonder, see, where the rock-plants lie!
III.
This flower she stopped at, finger on lip,
Stooped over, in doubt, as settling its claim;
Till she gave me, with pride to make no slip,
Its soft meandering Spanish name:
What a name! Was it love or praise?
Speech half-asleep or song half-awake?
I must learn Spanish, one of these days,
Only for that slow sweet name's sake.
IV.
Roses, if I live and do well,
I may bring her, one of these days,
To fix you fast with as fine a spell,
Fit you each with his Spanish phrase;
But do not detain me now; for she lingers
There, like sunshine over the ground,
And ever I see her soft white fingers
Searching after the bud she found.
V.
Flower, you Spaniard, look that you grow not,
Stay as you are and be loved for ever!
Bud, if I kiss you 'tis that you blow not:
Mind, the shut pink mouth opens never!
For while it pouts, her fingers wrestle,
Twinkling the audacious leaves between,
Till round they turn and down they nestle-
Is not the dear mark still to be seen?
VI.
Where I find her not, beauties vanish;
Whither I follow ber, beauties flee;
Is there no method to tell her in Spanish
June's twice June since she breathed it with me?
Come, bud, show me the least of her traces,
Treasure my lady's lightest footfall!
-Ah, you may flout and turn up your faces-
Roses, you are not so fair after all!
II. SIBRANDUS SCHAFNABURGENSIS.
Plague take all your pedants, say I!
He who wrote what I hold in my hand,
Centuries back was so good as to die,
Leaving this rubbish to cumber the land;
This, that was a book in its time,
Printed on paper and bound in leather,
Last month in the white of a matin-prime
Just when the birds sang all together.
II.
Into the garden I brought it to read,
And under the arbute and laurustine
Read it, so help me grace in my need,
From title-page to closing line.
Chapter on chapter did I count,
As a curious traveller counts Stonehenge;
Added up the mortal amount;
And then proceeded to my revenge.
III.
Yonder's a plum-tree with a crevice
An owl would build in, were he but sage;
For a lap of moss, like a fine pont-levis
In a castle of the Middle Age,
Joins to a lip of gum, pure amber;
When he'd be private, there might he spend
Hours alone in his lady's chamber:
Into this crevice I dropped our friend.
IV.
Splash, went he, as under he ducked,
-At the bottom, I knew, rain-drippings stagnate:
Next, a handful of blossoms I plucked
To bury him with, my bookshelf's magnate;
Then I went in-doors, brought out a loaf,
Half a cheese, and a bottle of Chablis;
Lay on the grass and forgot the oaf
Over a jolly chapter of Rabelais.
V.
Now, this morning, betwixt the moss
And gum that locked our friend in limbo,
A spider had spun his web across,
And sat in the midst with arms akimbo:
So, I took pity, for learning's sake,
And, de profundis, accentibus ltis,
Cantate! quoth I, as I got a rake;
And up I fished his delectable treatise.
VI.
Here you have it, dry in the sun,
With all the binding all of a blister,
And great blue spots where the ink has run,
And reddish streaks that wink and glister
O'er the page so beautifully yellow:
Oh, well have the droppings played their tricks!
Did he guess how toadstools grow, this fellow?
Here's one stuck in his chapter six!
VII.
How did he like it when the live creatures
Tickled and toused and browsed him all over,
And worm, slug, eft, with serious features,
Came in, each one, for his right of trover?
-When the water-beetle with great blind deaf face
Made of her eggs the stately deposit,
And the newt borrowed just so much of the preface
As tiled in the top of his black wife's closet?
VIII.
All that life and fun and romping,
All that frisking and twisting and coupling,
While slowly our poor friend's leaves were swamping
And clasps were cracking and covers suppling!
As if you bad carried sour John Knox
To the play-house at Paris, Vienna or Munich,
Fastened him into a front-row box,
And danced off the ballet with trousers and tunic.
IX.
Come, old martyr! What, torment enough is it?
Back to my room shall you take your sweet self.
Good-bye, mother-beetle; husband-eft, sufficit!
See the snug niche I have made on my shelf!
A.'s book shall prop you up, B.'s shall cover you,
Here's C. to be grave with, or D. to be gay,
And with E. on each side, and F. right over you,
Dry-rot at ease till the Judgment-day!
~ Robert Browning, Garden Francies
,#NFDB
571:City Without A Name
Who will honor the city without a name
If so many are dead and others pan gold
Or sell arms in faraway countries?
What shepherd's horn swathed in the bark of birch
Will sound in the Ponary Hills the memory of the absent—
Vagabonds, Pathfinders, brethren of a dissolved lodge?
This spring, in a desert, beyond a campsite flagpole,
—In silence that stretched to the solid rock of yellow and red mountains—
I heard in a gray bush the buzzing of wild bees.
The current carried an echo and the timber of rafts.
A man in a visored cap and a woman in a kerchief
Pushed hard with their four hands at a heavy steering oar.
In the library, below a tower painted with the signs of the zodiac,
Kontrym would take a whiff from his snuffbox and smile
For despite Metternich all was not yet lost.
And on crooked lanes down the middle of a sandy highway
Jewish carts went their way while a black grouse hooted
Standing on a cuirassier's helmet, a relict of La Grande Armée.
In Death Valley I thought about styles of hairdo,
About a hand that shifted spotlights at the Student's Ball
In the city from which no voice could reach me.
Minerals did not sound the last trumpet.
There was only the rustle of a loosened grain of lava.
38
In Death Valley salt gleams from a dried-up lake bed.
Defend, defend yourself, says the tick-tock of the blood.
From the futility of solid rock, no wisdom.
In Death Valley no hawk or eagle against the sky.
The prediction of a Gypsy woman has come true.
In a lane under an arcade, then, I was reading a poem
Of someone who had lived next door, entitled 'An Hour of Thought.'
I looked long at the rearview mirror: there, the one man
Within three miles, an Indian, was walking a bicycle uphill.
With flutes, with torches
And a drum, boom, boom,
Look, the one who died in Istanbul, there, in the first row.
He walks arm in arm with his young lady,
And over them swallows fly.
They carry oars or staffs garlanded with leaves
And bunches of flowers from the shores of the Green Lakes,
As they came closer and closer, down Castle Street.
And then suddenly nothing, only a white puff of cloud
Over the Humanities Student Club,
Division of Creative Writing.
Books, we have written a whole library of them.
Lands, we have visited a great many of them.
Battles, we have lost a number of them.
Till we are no more, we and our Maryla.
Understanding and pity,
We value them highly.
What else?
39
Beauty and kisses,
Fame and its prizes,
Who cares?
Doctors and lawyers,
Well-turned-out majors,
Six feet of earth.
Rings, furs, and lashes,
Glances at Masses,
Rest in peace.
Sweet twin breasts, good night.
Sleep through to the light,
Without spiders.
The sun goes down above the Zealous Lithuanian Lodge
And kindles fire on landscapes 'made from nature':
The Wilia winding among pines; black honey of the Żejmiana;
The Mereczanka washes berries near the Żegaryno village.
The valets had already brought in Theban candelabra
And pulled curtains, one after the other, slowly,
While, thinking I entered first, taking off my gloves,
I saw that all the eyes were fixed on me.
When I got rid of grieving
And the glory I was seeking,
Which I had no business doing,
I was carried by dragons
Over countries, bays, and mountains,
By fate, or by what happens.
40
Oh yes, I wanted to be me.
I toasted mirrors weepily
And learned my own stupidity.
From nails, mucous membrane,
Lungs, liver, bowels, and spleen
Whose house is made? Mine.
So what else is new?
I am not my own friend.
Time cuts me in two.
Monuments covered with snow,
Accept my gift. I wandered;
And where, I don't know.
Absent, burning, acrid, salty, sharp.
Thus the feast of Insubstantiality.
Under a gathering of clouds anywhere.
In a bay, on a plateau, in a dry arroyo.
No density. No harness of stone.
Even the Summa thins into straw and smoke.
And the angelic choirs fly over in a pomegranate seed
Sounding every few instants, not for us, their trumpets.
Light, universal, and yet it keeps changing.
For I love the light too, perhaps the light only.
Yet what is too dazzling and too high is not for me.
So when the clouds turn rosy, I think of light that is level
In the lands of birch and pine coated with crispy lichen,
Late in autumn, under the hoarfrost when the last milk caps
Rot under the firs and the hounds' barking echoes,
And jackdaws wheel over the tower of a Basilian church.
41
10
Unexpressed, untold.
But how?
The shortness of life,
the years quicker and quicker,
not remembering whether it happened in this or that autumn.
Retinues of homespun velveteen skirts,
giggles above a railing, pigtails askew,
sittings on chamberpots upstairs
when the sledge jingles under the columns of the porch
just before the moustachioed ones in wolf fur enter.
Female humanity,
children's snots, legs spread apart,
snarled hair, the milk boiling over,
stench, shit frozen into clods.
And those centuries,
conceiving in the herring smell of the middle of the night
instead of playing something like a game of chess
or dancing an intellectual ballet.
And palisades,
and pregnant sheep,
and pigs, fast eaters and poor eaters,
and cows cured by incantations.
11
Not the Last Judgment, just a kermess by a river.
Small whistles, clay chickens, candied hearts.
So we trudged through the slush of melting snow
To buy bagels from the district of Smorgonie.
A fortune-teller hawking: 'Your destiny, your planets.'
And a toy devil bobbing in a tube of crimson brine.
Another, a rubber one, expired in the air squeaking,
By the stand where you bought stories of King Otto and Melusine.
12
Why should that city, defenseless and pure as the wedding necklace of
42
a forgotten tribe, keep offering itself to me?
Like blue and red-brown seeds beaded in Tuzigoot in the copper desert
seven centuries ago.
Where ocher rubbed into stone still waits for the brow and cheekbone
it would adorn, though for all that time there has been no one.
What evil in me, what pity has made me deserve this offering?
It stands before me, ready, not even the smoke from one chimney is
lacking, not one echo, when I step across the rivers that separate us.
Perhaps Anna and Dora Drużyno have called to me, three hundred miles
inside Arizona, because except fo me no one else knows that they ever
lived.
They trot before me on Embankment Street, two hently born parakeets
from Samogitia, and at night they unravel their spinster tresses of gray
hair.
Here there is no earlier and no later; the seasons of the year and of the
day are simultaneous.
At dawn shit-wagons leave town in long rows and municipal employees
at the gate collect the turnpike toll in leather bags.
Rattling their wheels, 'Courier' and 'Speedy' move against the current
to Werki, and an oarsman shot down over England skiffs past, spreadeagled by his oars.
At St. Peter and Paul's the angels lower their thick eyelids in a smile
over a nun who has indecent thoughts.
43
Bearded, in a wig, Mrs. Sora Klok sits at the ocunter, instructing her
twelve shopgirls.
And all of German Street tosses into the air unfurled bolts of fabric,
preparing itself for death and the conquest of Jerusalem.
Black and princely, an underground river knocks at cellars of the
cathedral under the tomb of St. Casimir the Young and under the
half-charred oak logs in the hearth.
Carrying her servant's-basket on her shoulder, Barbara, dressed in
mourning, returns from the Lithuanian Mass at St. Nicholas to the
Romers' house in Bakszta Street.
How it glitters! the snow on Three Crosses Hill and Bekiesz Hill, not
to be melted by the breath of these brief lives.
And what do I know now, when I turn into Arsenal Street and open
my eyes once more on a useless end of the world?
I was running, as the silks rustled, through room after room without
stopping, for I believed in the existence of a last door.
But the shape of lips and an apple and a flower pinned to a dress were
all that one was permitted to know and take away.
The Earth, neither compassionate nor evil, neither beautiful nor atrocious, persisted, innocent, open to pain and desire.
And the gift was useless, if, later on, in the flarings of distant nights,
there was not less bitterness but more.
44
If I cannot so exhaust my life and their life that the bygone crying is
transformed, at last, into harmony.
Like a Noble Jan Dęboróg in the Straszun's secondhand-book shop, I am
put to rest forever between tow familiar names.
The castle tower above the leafy tumulus grows small and there is still
a hardly audible—is it Mozart's Requiem?—music.
In the immobile light I move my lips and perhaps I am even glad not
to find the desired word.
~ Czeslaw Milosz,#NFDB
9 Philosophy
9 Christianity
1 Poetry
1 Occultism
9 Plotinus
3 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 03
3 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 02
2 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04
1.68 - The God-Letters, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
With the vowels, one does seem to find a natural correspondence. (I wrote a Ballet "The Blind Prophet" on these lines, long before it struck me to investigate on scientific lines). The Hindus knew this with their A-U-M: A is the open breath, U the controlled force, M no breath at all. (See Magick, pp. 45-49). To me I is a shrill feminine sound, as O is the roar of the male. U is pursed, E hardly significant.
As to Magick, the Gnostics were chili con carne plus molten platinum plus a few girls I have known on the vowels. Their incantations con- sist almost entirely of combinations of these.[132] Seven at a time is very frequent; in fact it seems sometimes as if their theurgy depended on variations of these combinations. Their theology, too. Never mind that just now!
1.rb - Garden Francies, #Browning - Poems, #Robert Browning, #Poetry
And danced off the Ballet with trousers and tunic.
IX.
ENNEAD 02.09 - Against the Gnostics; or, That the Creator and the World are Not Evil., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 02, #Plotinus, #Christianity
The differences between the universal Soul and our (human) souls are very important. To begin with, the universal Soul does not govern the world in the same manner (as our soul governs the body); for she governs the world without being bound thereto. Besides many other differences elsewhere noted,324 we were bound to the body after the formation of a primary bond.325 In the universal Soul the nature that is bound to the body (of the world) binds all that it embraces; but the universal Soul herself is not bound by the things she binds. As she dominates them, she is impassible in respect to them, while we ourselves do not dominate exterior objects. Besides, that part of the universal Soul which rises to the intelligible world remains pure and independent; even that326 which communicates life to the body (of the world) receives nothing therefrom. In general what is in another being necessarily participates in the state of that being; but a principle which has its own individual life would not receive anything from any other source.327 That is why, when one thing is located within another, it feels the experiences of the latter, but does not any the less retain its individual life in the event of the destruction of the latter. For instance, if the fire within yourself be extinguished, that would not extinguish the universal fire; even if the latter were extinguished, the universal Soul would not feel it, and only the constitution of the body (of the world) would be affected thereby. If a world exclusively composed613 of the remaining three elements were a possibility, that would be of no importance to the universal Soul, because the world does not have a constitution similar that of each of the contained organisms. On high, the universal Soul soars above the world, and thereby imposes on it a sort of permanence; here below, the parts, which as it were flow off, are maintained in their place by a second bond.328 As celestial entities have no place (outside of the world), into which they might ooze out,329 there is no need of containing them from the interior, nor of compressing them from without to force them back within; they subsist in the location where the universal Soul placed them from the beginning. Those which naturally move modify the beings which possess no natural motion.330 They carry out well arranged revolutions because they are parts of the universe. Here below there are beings which perish because they cannot conform to the universal order. For instance, if a tortoise happened to be caught in the midst of a choric Ballet that was dancing in perfect order, it would be trodden under foot because it could not withdraw from the effects of the order that regulated the feet of the dancers; on the contrary, if it conformed to that order, it would suffer no harm.
GNOSTIC DEMANDS FOR REASON OF WORLD'S CREATION ARE IDLE, AND INVOLVE STILL LARGER QUESTIONS.
ENNEAD 03.02 - Of Providence., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04, #Plotinus, #Christianity
17. If Reason thus from its essence produce opposed things, the things it will produce will be so much the more opposed as they are more separated from each other. The sense-world is less unitary than its Reason, and consequently, it is more manifold, containing more oppositions. Thus, in individuals, the love of life has greater force; selfishness is more powerful in them; and often, by their avidity, they destroy what they love, when they love what is perishable. The love which each individual has for himself, makes him appropriate all he can in his relations with the universe. Thus the good and evil are led to do opposite things by the Art that governs the universe; just as a choric Ballet would be directed. One part is good, the other poor; but the whole is good. It might be objected that in this case no evil person will be left. Still, nothing hinders the existence of the evil; only they will not be such as they would be taken by themselves. Besides, this will be a motive of leniency in regard to them, unless Reason should decide that this leniency be not deserved, thereby making it impossible.107172
FOUNDED ON THE PUN ON LOGOS, AS CHARACTER, ROLE AND REASON, THE EVILS ARE SHOWN TO PLAY THEIR PART BADLY IN THE DRAMA OF LIFE.
ENNEAD 03.06 - Of the Impassibility of Incorporeal Entities (Soul and and Matter)., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 02, #Plotinus, #Christianity
2. What occurs in the soul when she contains a vice? We ask this because it is usual to say, "to snatch a vice from the soul;" "to introduce virtue into her," "to adorn her," "to replace ugliness by beauty in her." Let us also premiss, following the opinions of the ancients,30 that virtue is a harmony, and wickedness the opposite. That is the best means to solve the problem at issue. Indeed, when the parts of the soul (the rational part, the irascible part, and the part of appetite), harmonize with each other, we shall have virtue;31 and, in the contrary case, vice. Still, in both cases, nothing foreign to the soul enters into her; each of her parts remain what they are, while contri buting to harmony. On the other hand, when there is dissonance, they could not play the same parts as the personnel of a choric Ballet, who dance and sing in harmony, though not all of them fill the same functions; though one sings while the remainder are silent; and though each sings his own part; for it does not suffice that they all sing in tune, they must each properly sing his own part. In the soul we therefore have harmony when each part fulfils its functions. Still each must have its own virtue before the existence of a harmony; or its vice, before there is disharmony. What then is the thing whose presence makes each part of the soul good or evil? Evidently the presence of virtue or vice. The mere statement that, for the rational part (of the soul) vice consists in ignorance,32 is no more than a simple negation, and predicates nothing positive about reason.
THIS DEFINITION SUFFICES TO EXPLAIN THE FACTS OF EVIL IN THE SOUL.
ENNEAD 04.04 - Questions About the Soul., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 02, #Plotinus, #Christianity
STAR-MOTIONS COMPARED TO A Ballet-CHORUS.
The movement of the stars might be compared to that of a choric Ballet. Let us suppose that it had but a limited duration; its motion would be considered perfect, if viewed as a totality, from beginning to end; but if considered in its parts only, it would be imperfect. Now if we suppose that it exists always; then will it always be perfect. If it be always perfect, there will be neither time nor place where it is becoming perfect; consequently, it will not even have any desire, and it will measure nothing, neither by time nor place; and therefore will not remember either.
STARS HAVE NO MEMORY BECAUSE THEY ARE UNIFORMLY BLISSFUL.
--
33. As the circular movement of the world has nothing fortuitous, inasmuch as it is produced conformably to the reason of this great animal, a perfect symphonic (co-operation) between what "acts" and what "reacts" must exist within it; and there must also have been an order which would co-ordinate things one with another, so that at each of the phases of the circular movement of the world there might be a correspondence between the various beings subject to it, as if, in a varied choric Ballet the dancers formed a single figure. As to our own modern dances, it is easy to explain the eternal things which contri bute thereto, and which differ for every motion, like the sounds of the flute, the songs, and the other circumstances which are thereto related. It is not however as easy to conceive the motions of a person who conforms himself strictly to each figure, who accompanies,493 who raises one limb, or lowers another, who moves this limb, or holds the other limb motionless in a different attitude. The dancer's eyes are doubtless fixed on some further aim while his limbs are still responding to the motions inspired by the music, by co-operating in expressing them, and in completing them symmetrically. Likewise, a man learned in the art of dancing could explain the reason that, in such a figure, such a limb is raised, such a limb is bent, while others are hidden or lowered; not indeed that the dancer deliberates about these different attitudes, but because in the general movement of his body he considers such a posture suitable to such a limb to fulfil its proper part in the dance. Likewise do the stars produce certain facts, and announce other ones. The entire world realizes its universal life by causing the motion of the greater parts it comprises, by ceaselessly changing the figures, so that the different positions of the parts, and their mutual relations may determine the rest, and that things may occur as in a movement executed by a single moving living organism. Thus such a state is produced by such an attitude, such positions, such figures; while some other state is produced by some other kind of figures, and so forth. Consequently, the real authors of what is occurring do not seem to be those who carry out the figures, but He who commands them; and He who plans the figures does not do one thing while busying Himself with another, because He is not acting on something different from Himself; He himself is all the things that are done; He here is the figures (formed by the universal movement), He himself there is the resultant passions in the animal so moved and constituted by nature, simultaneously "active" and "passive" as the result of necessary laws.
494
ENNEAD 06.02 - The Categories of Plotinos., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 03, #Plotinus, #Christianity
10. In what sense, therefore, could each of the elements of essence be called "one"? In that it is something unitary, without being unity itself; for what is a "certain one" is already manifold. No species is "one" except figuratively306; for in itself it is manifold. It is in the same sense that, in this sense-world, we say that an army, or a choric Ballet, constitute a unity. Not in such things is absolute unity; and therefore it may not be said that unity is something common. Neither does unity reside in essence itself, nor in the910 individual essences; therefore, it is not a genus. When a genus is predicated of something, it is impossible to predicate of the same thing contrary properties; but of each of the elements of universal essence it is possible to assert both unity and its opposite. Consequently (if we have called unity a genus), after having predicated of some essence unity as a genus, we would have affirmed, of the same essence, that unity was not a genus. Unity, therefore, could not be considered one of the primary genera; for essence is no more one than it is manifold. As to the other genera, none of them is one without being manifold; much less could unity be predicated of the secondary genera of which each is quite manifold. Besides, no genus, considered in its totality, is unitary; so that if unity were a genus, it would merely thereby cease being unity; for unity is not a number, and nevertheless it would become a number in becoming a genus. Of course, numbers include an alleged unity, as soon as we try to erect it into a genus, it is no longer a unity, in a strict sense. Among numbers unity is not applied to them as would have been a genus; of such unity it is merely said that it is among numbers, not that it is a genus; likewise, if unity were among the essences, it would not be there as genus of essence, nor of anything else, nor of all things. Again, just as the simple is the principle of the composite without being considered a genus in respect to it then it would be simultaneously simple and compositeso, if one were considered to be a principle, it could not be a genus in respect to things subsumed under it; and therefore will be a genus neither for essence, nor for other (categories or things).
VARIOUS ARGUMENTS AGAINST UNITY AS A CATEGORY.
--
11. The questions here to be solved are, how unity subsists within essence, how they both divide, and in912 general how any genera divide; and whether their two divisions be identical, or different. To solve these questions, we shall first have to ask how in general any thing whatever is said to be one, and is one; then, if it can be said in the same sense that essence is one, in what sense this is said. Evidently, unity is not the same for everything. It cannot even be understood in the same sense in respect to sense-things, and intelligible things; not any more than essence is identical for these two order of (beings), or even for sense-things compared to each other. The idea of unity is not the same in reference to a choric Ballet, an army, a vessel or a house; it is even less so in respect of one of these things, and when it deals with continuous objects. And nevertheless, by their unity all these things imitate the same archetype, some from far, some from near. Intelligence, surely, is assuredly that which most approaches absolute Unity; for although the soul already possess unity, Intelligence possesses it far more intensely; for it is the one essence.
UNITY REIGNS STILL MORE IN THE GOOD.
Is the expression of the essence of something simultaneously the expression of its unity, so that it possesses as much unity as it possesses essence? Or does this simultaneousness exist without any direct proportion between the amount of unity and essence? Yes; for it is possible that something have less unity without, on that account, having any the less essence; an army, a choric Ballet have not less essence than a house, though far less unity. The unity present in each thing seems therefore to aspire to the Good, which has the most unity;311 for the closer something approaches the Good, the greater unity does it achieve; that is the criterion of greater or less unity. Indeed, every (being) desires not only merely to be (alive), but to enjoy the913 Good. That is why everything, so far as it can, hastens to become one, and those (beings) which by nature possess unity naturally trend towards Him by desiring to unite with themselves. For every (being) hastens not to separate from others, but on the contrary their tendency is to tend towards each other and themselves. That is why all souls, while preserving their individual nature, would like to fuse into a single soul. The One reigns everywhere in the sense-world, as well as in the Intelligible. It is from Him that everything originates, it is towards Him that everything trends. In Him do all (beings) seek their principle and their goal; for only therein do they find their good; only by that does each (being) subsist, and occupies its place in the universe; once that it exists, no (being) could help trending towards the One. This occurs not only in nature, but even in the arts; where each art seeks, to the extent of its ability, to conform its works to unity, to the extent of its ability, and to the possibilities of its works. But that which succeeds best, is Essence itself, which is quite close to unity.
FURTHER REASONS WHY UNITY IS NOT A CATEGORY.
ENNEAD 06.05 - The One and Identical Being is Everywhere Present In Its Entirety.345, #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04, #Plotinus, #Christianity
Chorus, see Ballet, vi. 9.8 (9-165).
Circe, i. 6.8 (1-53).
--
Simile of choral Ballet, vi. 9.8 (9-165).
Simile of circles, v. 8.7 (31-563); iv. 4.16 (28-462).
--
Simile of cosmic choric Ballet, vi. 9.8 (9-165).
Simile of Cupid and Psyche, vi. 9.9 (9-167).
ENNEAD 06.06 - Of Numbers., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 03, #Plotinus, #Christianity
Indeed, it is not you who here below produce number when you by discursive reason range through things that exist by themselves, and which do not depend for their existence on your enumeration; for you add nothing to the being of a man by enumerating him with another. That is no unity, as in a "choric Ballet." When you say, ten men, "ten" exists only in you who are enumerating. We could not assert that "ten" exists in the ten men you are enumerating, because these men are not co-ordinated so as to form a unity; it is you yourself who produce ten by enumerating this group of ten, and by making up a quantity. But when you say, a "choric Ballet," an "army," there is something which exists outside of these objects, and within yourself.39 How are we to understand that the number exists in you? The number which existed in you before you made the enumeration has another mode (of existence) (than the number that you produce by673 enumeration). As to the number which manifests itself in exterior objects and refers to the number within yourself, it constitutes an actualization of the essential numbers, or, is conformable to the essential Numbers; for, while enumerating you produce a number, and by this actualization you give hypostatic existence to quantity, as in walking you did to movement.
THE NUMBER WITHIN IS THE NUMBER CONSTITUTIVE OF OUR BEING.
ENNEAD 06.07 - How Ideas Multiplied, and the Good., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 03, #Plotinus, #Christianity
7. It may however be objected that if the soul produce the nature of a brute only when she is depraved and degraded, she was not originally destined to produce an ox or a horse; then the ("seminal) reason" of the horse, as well as the horse itself, will be contrary to the nature (of the soul). No: they are711 inferior to her nature, but they are not contrary to her. From her very origin, the soul was (potentially) the ("seminal) reason" of a horse or a dog. When permitted, the soul which was to beget an animal, produces something better; when hindered, she (only) produces what accords with the circumstances. She resembles the artists who, knowing how to produce several figures, create either the one they have received the order to create, or the one that is most suited to the material at hand. What hinders the (natural and generative) power of the universal Soul, in her quality of universal ("seminal) Reason," from sketching out the outlines of the body, before the soul powers (or, individual souls) should descend from her into matter? What hinders this sketch from being a kind of preliminary illumination of matter? What would hinder the individual soul from finishing (fashioning the body sketched by the universal Soul), following the lines already traced, and organizing the members pictured by them, and becoming that which she approached by giving herself some particular figure, just as, in a choric Ballet, the dancer confines himself to the part assigned to him?
THE SENSE-WORLD AND THE INTELLIGIBLE WORLD ARE CONNECTED BY THE MANIFOLD TRIPLE NATURE OF MAN.
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Is it by a mere play on words that life, intelligence and ideas are called good? Does the good constitute their being, or is each good taken in its totality? Good could not constitute the being of each of them. Are they then parts of the Good? The Good, however, is indivisible. The things that are beneath it are good for different reasons. The primary actualization (that proceeds from the Good) is good; likewise, the determination it receives is good, and the totality of both734 things is good. The actualization is good because it proceeds from the Good; the determination, because it is a perfection that has emanated from the Good; and the combination of actualization and determination because it is their totality. All these things thus are derived from one and the same principle, but nevertheless they are different. Thus (in a choric Ballet) the voice and the step proceed from one and the same person, in that they are all perfectly regulated. Now they are well regulated because they contain order and rhythm. What then is the content in the above-mentioned things that would make them good? But perhaps it may be objected that if the voice and step are well regulated, each one of them entirely owes it to some external principle, since the order is here applied to the things that differ from each other. On the contrary, the things of which we speak are each of them good in itself. And why are they good? It does not suffice to say that they are good because they proceed from the Good. Doubtless we shall have to grant that they are precious from the moment that they proceed from the Good, but reason demands that we shall determine that of which their goodness consists.
GOOD CANNOT BE A DESIRE OF THE SOUL.
ENNEAD 06.09 - Of the Good and the One., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 01, #Plotinus, #Christianity
1. All beings, both primary, as well as those who are so called on any pretext soever, are beings only because of their unity. What, indeed would they be without it? Deprived of their unity, they would cease to be what they are said to be. No army can exist unless it be one. So with a choric Ballet or a flock. Neither a house nor a ship can exist without unity; by losing it they would cease to be what they are.187 So also with continuous quantities which would not exist without unity. On being divided by losing their unity, they simultaneously lose their nature. Consider farther the bodies of plants and animals, of which each is a unity. On losing their unity by being broken up into several parts, they simultaneously lose their nature. They are no more what they were, they have become new beings, which themselves exist only so long as they are one. What effects health in us, is that the parts of our bodies are co-ordinated in unity. Beauty is formed by the unity of our members. Virtue is our soul's tendency to unity, and becoming one through the harmony of her faculties.
THE SOUL MAY IMPART UNITY, BUT IS NOT UNITY.
The soul imparts unity to all things when producing them, fashioning them, and forming them. Should we,148 therefore, after rising to the Soul, say that she not only imparts unity, but herself is unity in itself? Certainly not. The soul that imparts form and figure to bodies is not identical with form, and figure. Therefore the soul imparts unity without being unity. She unifies each of her productions only by contemplation of the One, just as she produces man only by contemplating Man-in-himself, although adding to that idea the implied unity. Each of the things that are called "one" have a unity proportionate to their nature ("being"); so that they participate in unity more or less according as they share essence188 (being). Thus the soul is something different from unity; nevertheless, as she exists in a degree higher (than the body), she participates more in unity, without being unity itself; indeed she is one, but the unity in her is no more than contingent. There is a difference between the soul and unity, just as between the body and unity. A discrete quantity such as a company of dancers, or choric Ballet, is very far from being unity; a continuous quantity approximates that further; the soul gets still nearer to it, and participates therein still more. Thus from the fact that the soul could not exist without being one, the identity between the soul and unity is suggested. But this may be answered in two ways. First, other things also possess individual existence because they possess unity, and nevertheless are not unity itself; as, though the body is not identical with unity, it also participates in unity. Further, the soul is manifold as well as one, though she be not composed of parts. She possesses several faculties, discursive reason, desire, and perceptionall of them faculties joined together by unity as a bond. Doubtless the soul imparts unity to something else (the body), because she herself possesses unity; but this unity is by her received from some other principle (namely, from unity itself).
149
--
THE FAMOUS ILLUSTRATION OF THE COSMIC CHORAL Ballet.
As the One does not contain any difference, He is always present; and we are ever present to Him as soon as we contain no more difference. It is not He who is aspiring to us, or who is moving around us; on the contrary, it is we who are aspiring to Him. Though we always move around Him, we do not always keep our glance fixed on Him. We resemble a chorus which always surrounds its leader, but (the members of) which do not always sing in time because they allow their attention to be distracted to some exterior object; while, if they turned towards the leader, they would sing well, and really be with him. Likewise, we always turn around the One, even when we detach ourselves from Him, and cease knowing Him. Our glance is not always fixed on the One; but when we contemplate Him, we attain the purpose of our desires, and enjoy the rest taught by Heraclitus.204 Then we disagree no more, and really form a divine choric Ballet around Him.
FOLLOWING NUMENIUS, PLOTINOS DESCRIBES THE SUPREME AS GIVER.
9. In this choric Ballet, the soul sees the source of life, the source of intelligence, the principle of being, the cause of the good, and the root of love. All these entities are derived from the One without diminishing Him. He is indeed no corporeal mass; otherwise the things that are born of Him would be perishable. However, they are eternal, because their principle ever remains the same, because205 He does not divide Himself to produce them, but remains entire. They persist, just as the light persists so long as the sun remains.206 Nor are we separated from the One; we are not distant from Him, though corporeal nature,166 by approaching us, has attracted us to it (thus drawing us away from the One).207 But it is in the One that we brea the and have our being.208 He gave us life not merely at a given moment, only to leave us later; but His giving is perpetual, so long as He remains what He is, or rather, so long as we turn towards Him. There it is that we find happiness, while to withdraw from Him is to fall. It is in Him that our soul rests; it is by rising to that place free from all evil that she is delivered from evils; there she really thinks, there she is impassible, there she really lives. Our present life, in which we are not united with the divinity, is only a trace or adumbration of real life. Real life (which is presence with the divinity) is the actualization of intelligence. It is this actualization of intelligence which begets the divinities by a sort of silent intercourse with the One; thereby begetting beauty, justice and virtue. These are begotten by the soul that is filled with divinity. In Him is her principle and goal; her principle, because it is from there that she proceeds; her goal, because there is the good to which she aspires, so that by returning thither she again becomes what she was. Life here below, in the midst of sense-objects, is for the soul a degradation, an exile, a loss of her wings.209
THE PARABLE OF CUPID AND PSYCHE, LEADING UP TO DIVINIZATION.
Liber 46 - The Key of the Mysteries, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
and even resurrections by the use of the universal medicine. A Ballet
girl of the Opera, who believed in him, came one day to see him, and
The Act of Creation text, #The Act of Creation, #Arthur Koestler, #Psychology
sonator of acrobats, Ballet dancers, and fairies: Caliban imitating Ariel.
He is a collection of deformities, bodily and functional; he stumbles
--- Overview of noun ballet
The noun ballet has 2 senses (first 2 from tagged texts)
1. (4) ballet, concert dance ::: (a theatrical representation of a story that is performed to music by trained dancers)
2. (1) ballet ::: (music written for a ballet)
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun ballet
2 senses of ballet
Sense 1
ballet, concert dance
=> stage dancing, choreography
=> dancing, dance, terpsichore, saltation
=> diversion, recreation
=> activity
=> act, deed, human action, human activity
=> event
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
=> performing arts
=> humanistic discipline, humanities, liberal arts, arts
=> discipline, subject, subject area, subject field, field, field of study, study, bailiwick
=> knowledge domain, knowledge base, domain
=> content, cognitive content, mental object
=> cognition, knowledge, noesis
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
=> show
=> social event
=> event
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 2
ballet
=> music
=> auditory communication
=> communication
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
--- Hyponyms of noun ballet
1 of 2 senses of ballet
Sense 1
ballet, concert dance
=> classical ballet
=> modern ballet
=> comedy ballet
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun ballet
2 senses of ballet
Sense 1
ballet, concert dance
=> stage dancing, choreography
Sense 2
ballet
=> music
--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun ballet
2 senses of ballet
Sense 1
ballet, concert dance
-> stage dancing, choreography
=> ballet, concert dance
=> modern dance
=> apache dance
=> belly dance, belly dancing, danse du ventre
=> bolero
=> cakewalk
=> cancan
=> nude dancing
Sense 2
ballet
-> music
=> section, subdivision
=> pizzicato
=> monophony, monophonic music, monody
=> polyphony, polyphonic music, concerted music
=> polytonality, polytonalism
=> popularism
=> harmony, musical harmony
=> tune, melody, air, strain, melodic line, line, melodic phrase
=> part music
=> musical composition, opus, composition, piece, piece of music
=> instrumental music
=> prelude
=> overture
=> antiphony
=> refrain, chorus
=> ballet
=> dance music
=> serialism, serial music
=> syncopation
=> music genre, musical genre, genre, musical style
=> Bach
=> Beethoven
=> Brahms
=> Chopin
=> Gilbert and Sullivan
=> Handel
=> Haydn
=> Mozart
=> Stravinsky
=> Wagner
=> Ta'ziyeh
=> vocal music, vocal
--- Grep of noun ballet
ballet
ballet company
ballet dancer
ballet master
ballet mistress
ballet position
ballet skirt
balletomane
balletomania
classical ballet
comedy ballet
corps de ballet
modern ballet
Wikipedia - Aaron Robison -- British ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Abdurrahman Nokshiqi -- Albanian ballet dancer and choreographer
Wikipedia - Abi Stafford -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Agnes Oaks -- Estonian ballet dancer
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Wikipedia - Aku Ahjolinna -- Finnish ballet dancer and choreographer
Wikipedia - Alberta Ballet Company -- A ballet professional company
Wikipedia - Albert Evans (dancer) -- American ballet dancer and choreographer
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Wikipedia - Alexandra Waterbury -- American ballet dancer and model
Wikipedia - Alice Murer Siem -- Norwegian ballet dancer and choreographer
Wikipedia - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (ballet)
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Wikipedia - A Midsummer Night's Dream (ballet) -- 1962 ballet by George Balanchine
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Wikipedia - Category:Ballet composers
Wikipedia - Category:Ballet-related lists
Wikipedia - Category:Ballet terminology
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Wikipedia - Chase Finlay -- American ballet dancer
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Wikipedia - Classical ballet
Wikipedia - Class of perfection -- an advanced ballet class
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Wikipedia - Contemporary ballet
Wikipedia - Coppelia -- Comic ballet composed by Leo Delibes
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Wikipedia - Corps de ballet
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Wikipedia - Cuban National Ballet School -- National ballet school of Cuba
Wikipedia - Damian Smith (dancer) -- Australian ballet dancer
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Wikipedia - Danielle Brown (dancer) -- American ballet dancer
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Wikipedia - Erica Cornejo -- Argentine ballet dancer
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Wikipedia - Ethan Stiefel -- American ballet dancer, choreographer and director
Wikipedia - Fabrice Calmels -- French ballet dancer
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Wikipedia - Federico Bonelli -- Italian ballet dancer
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Wikipedia - Fish dive (ballet)
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Wikipedia - Francesca Velicu -- Romanian ballet dancer
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Wikipedia - Fredrick Davis (dancer) -- 21st-century American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - French ballet -- History of classical ballet in France
Wikipedia - Friedemann Vogel -- German ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Gary Avis -- English ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Gayane (ballet) -- Ballet by Khachaturian
Wikipedia - George Balanchine -- Georgian-American choreographer, dancer and ballet master
Wikipedia - George Skibine -- Russian ballet dancer, teacher and choreographer
Wikipedia - Georgina Parkinson -- British ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Georgina Pazcoguin -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Gillian Murphy -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Giselle -- Romantic ballet in two acts
Wikipedia - Giuseppina Bozzacchi -- Italian ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Glass Pieces -- Ballet by Jerome Robbins to music by Philip Glass
Wikipedia - Glossary of ballet -- Wikipedia glossary
Wikipedia - Golden Ballet -- American thoroughbred racehorse
Wikipedia - Greensboro Ballet -- American ballet company
Wikipedia - Greta Hodgkinson -- American Canadian ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Gudrun Bojesen -- Danish ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Guillaume Cote -- Canadian ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Gwangju City Ballet -- South Korean ballet company
Wikipedia - Heather Ogden -- Canadian ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Hee Seo -- South Korean ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Helene Bouchet -- French ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Hikaru Kobayashi -- Japanese ballet dancer
Wikipedia - History of ballet
Wikipedia - Holly Dorger -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Houston Ballet -- Ballet company in the USA
Wikipedia - Hurry Up, We're Dreaming (ballet) -- 2018 ballet by Justin Peck and M83
Wikipedia - Iana Salenko -- Ukrainian-German ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Ian Casady -- American professional ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Ida Praetorius -- Danish ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Ingrid Silva -- Brazilian ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Irena Milovan -- Yugoslav ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Isabelle Ciaravola -- French ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Istvan Martin -- Frenco-Hungarian ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Italian ballet
Wikipedia - Itziar Mendizabal -- Spanish ballet dancer]
Wikipedia - Jaclyn Betham -- American actress and ballet dancer
Wikipedia - J'aime Crandall -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - James B. Whiteside -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Jared Redick -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Jeffrey Cirio -- American classical ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Jelko Yuresha -- British ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Jenny Brandt -- Swedish ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Jeux -- Ballet by Claude Debussy
Wikipedia - Jillian Vanstone -- Canadian ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Joan Gadsdon -- Australian ballet dancer, actor and artist
Wikipedia - Jonathan Stafford -- American ballet dancer and artistic director
Wikipedia - Joo Won Ahn -- South Korean ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Joseph Caley -- English ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Judy Tyrus -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Julie Kent (dancer) -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Juliette Price -- Danish ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Jungle (ballet) -- Ballet by Rudi van Dantzig
Wikipedia - Jurgita Dronina -- Russian-Lithuanian ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Jutta Deutschland -- German ballet dancer and choreographer
Wikipedia - Karen Taft -- Danish ballet dancer and choreographer
Wikipedia - Karin von Aroldingen -- German ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Kathleen Breen Combes -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Kathryn Morgan -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Katy Pyle -- American ballet dancer and choreographer
Wikipedia - Kilian O'Callaghan -- `Irish ballet dancer, teacher and choreographer, and academic administrator
Wikipedia - Kip Gamblin -- Australian ballet dancer and actor
Wikipedia - Kizzy Matiakis -- English ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Ksenia Tripolitova -- Lithuanian-born Russian ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Kylie Shea -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - La Esmeralda (ballet) -- Ballet by Cesare Pugni and Jules Perrot
Wikipedia - Lana Jones -- Australian ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Langston Fishburne -- American actor and ballet dancer
Wikipedia - La statue retrouvM-CM-)e -- short composition for trumpet and organ by Erik Satie for the ballet "Parade" (premiered 1923)
Wikipedia - Laura Morera -- Spanish ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Laurretta Summerscales -- British ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Lawrence Leritz -- American ballet dancer and choreographer
Wikipedia - Le Corsaire -- Ballet
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Wikipedia - Leo Kersley -- British ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Les Grands Ballets Canadiens -- Ballet company based in Montreal, Quebec
Wikipedia - Lia Cirio -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Lisa Rinehart -- Former dancer with American Ballet Theatre
Wikipedia - Liselotte Maikl -- Austrian soprano and ballett dancer
Wikipedia - Lis Jeppesen -- Danish ballet dancer
Wikipedia - List of 1932 ballet premieres
Wikipedia - List of 1933 ballet premieres
Wikipedia - List of 1934 ballet premieres
Wikipedia - List of ballets by Adolphe Adam -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of ballets by Christoph Willibald Gluck -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of ballets by LM-CM-)o Delibes -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of ballets by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of ballets by title
Wikipedia - List of historical ballet characters
Wikipedia - List of Houston Ballet performers -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of New York City Ballet dancers -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Oregon Ballet Theatre performers -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Russian ballet dancers -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - LM-CM-)onide Massine -- Russian choreographer and ballet dancer
Wikipedia - LM-CM-)onore Baulac -- ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Los Angeles Ballet -- Ballet company
Wikipedia - Lucette Aldous -- Australian ballerina and ballet teacher
Wikipedia - Lucia Lacarra -- Spanish ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Luna Andermatt -- Portuguese ballet dancer, ballet teacher and choreographer
Wikipedia - Lydia Kyasht -- Russian-British ballet dancer and teacher
Wikipedia - Lydia Lopokova -- Russian ballet dancer (1892-1981)
Wikipedia - Madeleine Eastoe -- Australian ballet dancer
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Wikipedia - Mads Blangstrup -- Danish ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Magdalena Treitschke -- Austrian ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Maia Makhateli -- Georgian ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Marcelino SambM-CM-) -- Portuguese ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Maria Eichwald -- Kazakhstani ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Maria Kochetkova -- Russian ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Maria Kowroski -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Marianela NuM-CM-1ez -- Argentine ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Maria ViganM-CM-2 -- Austrian ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Marie-Agnes Gillot -- French ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Marie SallM-CM-) -- French ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Marie Walton-Mahon -- Australian ballet dancer and teacher
Wikipedia - Mariinsky Theatre -- opera and ballet theatre in Saint Petersburg, Russia
Wikipedia - Marina Eglevsky -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Marina Semyonova -- Soviet ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Marjorie Hollinshed -- Ballet dancer and teacher (b. 1905, d. 1995)
Wikipedia - Maryhelen Mayfield -- American ballet dancer and arts director
Wikipedia - Mary Meerson -- French ballet dancer and model
Wikipedia - Matthew Ball (dancer) -- British ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Maurice BM-CM-)jart -- French-born Swiss ballet dancer and choreographer
Wikipedia - Mayara Magri (dancer) -- Brazilian ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Megan Fairchild -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Megan LeCrone -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Melissa Hamilton -- Northern Irish ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Melissa Hough -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Mel Tomlinson -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Merritt Moore -- American ballet dancer and quantum physicist
Wikipedia - Metastaseis and Pithoprakta -- ballet by George Balanchine
Wikipedia - Mette Bodtcher -- Danish ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Mette Honningen -- Danish ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Michaela DePrince -- Sierra Leonean-American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Miguel Campaneria -- Cuban ballet dancer and choreographer
Wikipedia - Misty Copeland -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Mona Vangsaae -- Danish ballet dancer, choreographer and instructor
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Wikipedia - Moscelyne Larkin -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Moscow State Academy of Choreography -- Ballet school in Moscow, Russia
Wikipedia - Music for an Aquatic Ballet
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Wikipedia - Nancy Osbaldeston -- English ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Narrative ballet
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Wikipedia - National Ballet of China -- National ballet company of China
Wikipedia - National Ballet Theater of Puerto Rico -- Ballet company in Puerto Rico
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Wikipedia - Neoclassical ballet
Wikipedia - New York City Ballet -- American ballet company
Wikipedia - Nikisha Fogo -- Swedish ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Nikolai Fadeyechev -- Russian ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Nina Popova -- Russian-American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Ninette de Valois -- Irish-born British dancer, teacher and choreographer, founder of The Royal Ballet and what became the Birmingham Royal Ballet, and of the Royal Ballet School
Wikipedia - Noelani Pantastico -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Notre Dame de Paris (ballet)
Wikipedia - Ocean's Kingdom (ballet) -- Ballet choreographed by Peter Martins
Wikipedia - Olga (ballet)
Wikipedia - Olivia Boisson -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Only When You Leave -- 1984 single by Spandau Ballet
Wikipedia - Oriella Dorella -- Italian ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Orpheus (ballet)
Wikipedia - Othello Ballet Suite/Electronic Organ Sonata No. 1
Wikipedia - Othello (ballet)
Wikipedia - Overture -- Instrumental introduction to an opera, ballet, or oratorio
Wikipedia - Pacific Northwest Ballet -- Ballet company of Seattle, USA
Wikipedia - Parade (ballet)
Wikipedia - Paris Opera Ballet -- French ballet company
Wikipedia - Pas de quatre (ballet)
Wikipedia - Paul Frame -- American ballet dancer and chiropractor
Wikipedia - Peter Dala -- Canadian conductor of opera and ballet
Wikipedia - Peter Frame -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Philippine Ballet Theatre -- Classical ballet company in the Philippines
Wikipedia - Picasso and the Ballets Russes -- Pablo Picasso's involvement and collaborations with the Ballets Russes
Wikipedia - Pina Bausch -- German dancer, choreographer, dance teacher and ballet director
Wikipedia - Pointe shoe -- Ballet shoe with stiffened toe for dancing en pointe
Wikipedia - Polina Semionova -- Russian ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Position of the arms in ballet
Wikipedia - Positions of the arms in ballet
Wikipedia - Positions of the feet in ballet -- Part of classical ballet technique
Wikipedia - Precious Adams -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Prima ballerina assoluta -- Title awarded to the most notable of female ballet dancers
Wikipedia - Raissa Calza -- Ukrainian archaeologist of Ostia Antica, ballet dancer, and actor
Wikipedia - Ramayana Ballet -- A visualization and representation of the epic Ramayana saga
Wikipedia - Rasta Thomas -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Raymonda Variations -- Ballet by George Balanchine
Wikipedia - Rebecca Krohn -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Resurrection (ballet) -- Ballet by Martha Graham
Wikipedia - Rex Harrington -- Greek-Canadian ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Richard Buckle -- British ballet critic
Wikipedia - Richard Cragun -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Richard Thomas (dancer) -- American ballet dancer, born 1925
Wikipedia - RM-CM-)pM-CM-)titeur -- Accompanist or coach of ballet dancers or opera singers
Wikipedia - Robyn Hendricks -- South African ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Rodeo (ballet) -- Ballet scored by Aaron Copland and choreographed by Agnes de Mille
Wikipedia - Rodeo: Four Dance Episodes -- Ballet by Justin Peck to music by Aaron Copland
Wikipedia - Romantic ballet
Wikipedia - Romeo and Juliet (Cranko) -- 1962 ballet by John Cranko
Wikipedia - Romeo and Juliet (Lavery) -- 1991 ballet by Sean Lavery
Wikipedia - Romeo and Juliet (Pastor) -- 2008 ballet by Krzysztof Pastor
Wikipedia - Romeo and Juliet (Prokofiev) -- 1935 ballet by Sergei Prokofiev
Wikipedia - Romeo + Juliet (ballet) -- 2007 ballet by Peter Martins
Wikipedia - Rosemarie Lindt -- German actress and ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Rudolf Nureyev -- Soviet ballet dancer and choreographer
Wikipedia - Rushin' Ballet -- 1937 film
Wikipedia - Russian ballet -- Characteristics of Russian ballet
Wikipedia - Sabre Dance -- Movement in Khachaturian's ballet Gayane
Wikipedia - Sabrina Brazzo -- Italian ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Sadaise Arencibia -- Cuban ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Sally Brayley -- Canadian-American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Sally Gilmour -- British ballet dancer
Wikipedia - San Francisco Ballet -- U.S. ballet company
Wikipedia - Sarah Lane -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Sarah Van Patten -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Sara Leland -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Sara Mearns -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Sasha De Sola -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Serenade (ballet) -- ballet by George Balanchine to Tchaikovsky's 1880 Serenade for Strings in C, Op. 48
Wikipedia - Sergei Polunin -- Soviet-born ballet dancer, actor and model
Wikipedia - Silja Schandorff -- Danish ballet dancer and ballet master
Wikipedia - Silvia Azzoni -- Italian ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Skylar Brandt -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Smuin Ballet -- Touring ballet company based in San Francisco
Wikipedia - Sofiane Sylve -- French ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Sofya Skya -- Russian ballet dancer and actor
Wikipedia - Soloist (ballet)
Wikipedia - Sonia Rodriguez -- Canadian ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Sophie Daguin -- French actress and ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Sophie Martin -- French ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Sophie Rebecca -- English transgender ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Spartacus (ballet)
Wikipedia - Stars of the Russian Ballet -- 1953 film
Wikipedia - Stella Abrera -- Filipina-American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Sterling Hyltin -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Suite en Blanc -- Ballet by Serge Lifar
Wikipedia - Susana Aguero -- Argentine ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Susan Hendl -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Svetlana Lunkina -- Russian ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Swan Lake (Bourne) -- ballet choreographed by Matthew Bourne
Wikipedia - Swan Lake -- Ballet by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Wikipedia - Sydney Magruder Washington -- American ballet dancer and blogger
Wikipedia - Sylvie Guillem -- French ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Tamara Rojo -- Spanish ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Tamara Tchinarova -- Australian ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Tamara Toumanova -- Russian ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Tamiyo Kusakari -- Japanese ballet dancer and actress
Wikipedia - Taylor Stanley -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Telstra Ballet Dancer Awards -- Australian ballet dancer awards
Wikipedia - Template talk:Ballet
Wikipedia - Teresa Reichlen -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Theatre music -- Music composed or adapted for performance in theatres (including operas, ballets, and stage musicals)
Wikipedia - The Ballet Girl (1916 film) -- 1916 film
Wikipedia - The Ballet Girl -- 1918 film
Wikipedia - The Dream (ballet)
Wikipedia - The Fountain of Bakhchisarai (ballet) -- Ballet to music by Boris Asafyev
Wikipedia - The Miraculous Mandarin -- Pantomime ballet by BM-CM-)la Bartok
Wikipedia - The Nutcracker -- Ballet by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Wikipedia - Theodore Kosloff -- Russian-American ballet dancer, choreographer, and actor
Wikipedia - The Rite of Spring -- Ballet by Igor Stravinsky
Wikipedia - The Runaway (ballet) -- Ballet choreographed by Kyle Abraham
Wikipedia - The Seasons (ballet)
Wikipedia - The Sleeping Beauty (ballet) -- Ballet by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Wikipedia - The Tell-Tale Heart (1961 film) -- 1961 Australian ballet directed by Alan Burke
Wikipedia - The Times Are Racing -- Ballet by Justin Peck
Wikipedia - The Winter's Tale (ballet)
Wikipedia - Thomas Forster (dancer) -- English ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Tiler Peck -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Timeline of ballet
Wikipedia - Turnout (ballet)
Wikipedia - Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet
Wikipedia - Valborg Borchsenius -- Danish ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Valentine Colasante -- ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Vampires in popular culture -- |Vampires in popular culture include appearances in ballet, films, literature, music, opera, theatre, paintings, and video games
Wikipedia - Vanessa Hooper -- British ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Variation (ballet)
Wikipedia - Vaslav Nijinsky -- Polish ballet dancer and choreographer
Wikipedia - Veronika Part -- Russian ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Vincenzo Galeotti -- Italian-born Danish dancer, choreographer and ballet master
Wikipedia - Violette Verdy -- Ballet dancer, choreographer, and professor
Wikipedia - Vladimir Shklyarov -- Russian ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Wassily de Basil -- Russian ballet impresario
Wikipedia - Wayne Eagling -- Canadian ballet dancer, now retired
Wikipedia - Western stereotype of the male ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Whitney Jensen -- American ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Wikipedia:WikiProject Ballet -- Wikimedia subject-area collaboration
Wikipedia - Wilhelm Burmann -- German dancer, ballet master, and teacher
Wikipedia - Within the Golden Hour -- Ballet by Christopher Wheeldon
Wikipedia - Xiomara Reyes -- Cuban ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Yugen (ballet)
Wikipedia - Yuhui Choe -- Korean ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Yuka Ebihara -- Japanese ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Yukichi Hattori -- Japanese-Canadian ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Yury Yanowsky -- Spanish ballet dancer and choreographer
Wikipedia - Yvonne Georgi -- German ballet dancer
Wikipedia - Zebo Aminzoda -- Tajikistani ballet dancer and choreographer
Wikipedia - Zenaida Yanowsky -- Spanish ballet dancer
Rudolf Nureyev ::: Born: March 17, 1938; Died: January 6, 1993; Occupation: Ballet Dancer;
Paul Taylor ::: Born: July 29, 1930; Occupation: Ballet choreographer;
Ninette de Valois ::: Born: June 6, 1898; Died: March 8, 2001; Occupation: Ballet choreographer;
August Bournonville ::: Born: August 21, 1805; Died: November 30, 1879; Occupation: Ballet choreographer;
Antony Tudor ::: Born: April 4, 1908; Died: April 19, 1987; Occupation: Ballet choreographer;
Sergei Prokofiev ::: Born: April 23, 1891; Died: March 5, 1953; Occupation: Ballet composer;
Vaslav Nijinsky ::: Born: March 12, 1890; Died: April 8, 1950; Occupation: Ballet Dancer;
Galina Ulanova ::: Born: January 8, 1910; Died: March 21, 1998; Occupation: Ballet Dancer;
Maurice Bejart ::: Born: January 1, 1927; Died: November 22, 2007; Occupation: Ballet choreographer;
Sylvie Guillem ::: Born: February 25, 1965; Occupation: Ballet Dancer;
Maya Plisetskaya ::: Born: November 20, 1925; Died: May 2, 2015; Occupation: Ballet Dancer;
Agrippina Vaganova ::: Born: July 6, 1879; Died: November 5, 1951; Occupation: Ballet Teacher;
Alonzo King ::: Born: 1952; Occupation: Ballet choreographer;
Gillian Murphy ::: Born: April 11, 1979; Occupation: Ballet Dancer;
Michaela DePrince ::: Born: January 6, 1995; Occupation: Ballet Dancer;
Sergei Polunin ::: Born: November 20, 1989; Occupation: Ballet Dancer;
Janet Collins ::: Born: March 7, 1917; Died: May 28, 2003; Occupation: Ballet Dancer;
Li Cunxin ::: Born: January 26, 1961; Occupation: Ballet Dancer;
Karen Kain ::: Born: March 28, 1951; Occupation: Ballet Dancer;
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Goodreads author - Joseph_Balletti
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Creator/LesBalletsTrockaderoDeMonteCarlo
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/BalletShoes
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Ballet
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BalletEpisode
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CreepyBallet
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DaintyLittleBalletDancers
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DreamBallet
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OpeningBallet
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Music/GulletBallet
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Music/SpandauBallet
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Sandbox/Ballet
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ballet
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/File:Ellen_Price_as_the_Little_Mermaid,_Royal_Danish_Ballet,_1909_(3).jpg
Angelina Ballerina (2002 - 2006) - a British animated children's television series, based on the Angelina Ballerina series of children's books by author Katharine Holabird and illustrator Helen Craig. The series is about Angelina Mouseling, a young mouse who loves to dance ballet, and her family and classmates. Finty Williams perform...
Princess tutu (2002 - 2003) - is a Japanese magical girl anime series created by Ikuko Itoh in 2002 for animation studio Hal Film Maker. Inspired by ballet and fairy tales, particularly The Ugly Duckling and Swan Lake,nce there was a writer named Drosselmeyer, who had the power to make his stories come to life. But he died befor...
Great Performances (1972 - Current) - PBS TV series showcasing the performing arts. The series is the longest running performing arts anthology on television, as opposed to a program like Hallmark Hall of Fame, which presents only adaptations of plays and novels as well as made-for-TV films. Great Performances presents concerts, ballet,...
The Nutcracker Prince(1990) - Clara is on the verge of growing up with dreams of traveling the world in the grand ballet. Then, during the annual Christmas party, the mysterious family friend, Drosselmeier, tells her a story about a young man named Hans who rescued a princess under a spell by the Mouse Queen and her whining son....
Suspiria(1977) - A newcomer to a fancy ballet academy gradually comes to realize that the staff of the school are actually a coven of witches bent on chaos and destruction.
Audition(1999) - Seven years after the death of his wife, company executive Aoyama is invited to sit in on auditions for an actress. Leafing through the resums in advance, his eye is caught by Yamazaki Asami, a striking young woman with ballet training. On the day of the audition, she's the last person they see....
Six Weeks(1982) - California politician Patrick Dalton (Dudley Moore) befriends a mother named Charlotte Dreyfus (Mary Tyler Moore) and her daughter, a leukemia-stricken ballet enthusiast named Nicole (Katherine Healy). Dalton helps the Dreyfus' out during the final weeks of Nicole's life.
White Nights(1985) - Nikolai Rodchenko (Mikhail Baryshnikov) defected from Soviet Russia and became one of America's best ballet dancers. While on a plane for a trip, he flies over Russia. Unfortunately, when a malfunction happens to the plane, the plane must enter the land he exited. The government wants him to be part...
Brain Donors(1992) - Three manic idiots; a lawyer, cab driver and a handyman team up to run a ballet company to fulfill the will of a millionaire. Stooge-like antics result as the trio try to outwit the rich widow and her scheming big-shot lawyer, who also wants to run the ballet.
Tom & Jerry: A Nutcracker Tale(2006) - After Jerry and Tuffy see the local Christmas ballet, Jerry sees on the stage that magic things begin to happen including toys coming to life and a sparkling snow falling. Moreover one of the toys that comes to life is a dancing ballerina Jerry fanned upon during the show. Sure enough the ballerina...
Nutcracker: The Motion Picture(1986) - The feature film adaptation of the 1983-2014 stage version of The Nutcracker performed by the Pacific Northwest Ballet.
Jeremy(1973) - Jeremy Jones is learning Cello at an arts school in New York. At school he spots Susan Rollins, who practices for a ballet audition, and he falls in love on first sight. He's very diffident in nearing her, so he gets some help of his experienced friend Ralph. Susan's first impression isn't great, un...
Black Swan(2010) - A ballet dancer wins the lead in "Swan Lake" and is perfect for the role of the delicate White Swan - Princess Odette - but slowly loses her mind as she becomes more and more like Odile, the Black Swan.
Center Stage(2000) - A group of 12 teenagers from various backgrounds enroll at the American Ballet Academy in New York to make it as ballet dancers and each one deals with the problems and stress of training and getting ahead in the world of dance.
The Coolangatta Gold(1984) - A youth conflicts with his father while the former is becoming romantically involved with a ballet dancing student and he and his older brother are training for the Coolangatta Gold. The youth ends up trying to win the race to humiliate his father.
The Company(2003) - Ensemble drama centered around a group of ballet dancers, with a focus on one young dancer who's poised to become a principal performer.
The Nutcracker and the Four Realms(2018) - A young girl is gifted a locketed egg from her deceased mother but the key to open to egg is in a magical land and she must go on a journey to retrieve it. Based on the tale "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King" with musical sequences based on Tchaikovsky's ballet.
Ballet Shoes (2007) ::: 6.6/10 -- PG | 1h 25min | Drama, Family | TV Movie 30 December 2007 -- The story of three orphan girls - Pauline (Emma Watson), Petrova (Yasmin Paige), and Posy (Lucy Boynton) - adopted by an eccentric explorer, Great Uncle Matthew (Richard Griffiths), and his niece Sylvia Brown (Emilia Fox), in 1930s London. Director: Sandra Goldbacher Writers:
Brain Donors (1992) ::: 7.1/10 -- PG | 1h 20min | Comedy | 17 April 1992 (USA) -- Three manic idiots; a lawyer, cab driver and a handyman team up to run a ballet company to fulfill the will of a millionaire. Stooge-like antics result as the trio try to outwit the rich widow. Director: Dennis Dugan Writers:
Center Stage (2000) ::: 6.7/10 -- PG-13 | 1h 55min | Drama, Music, Romance | 12 May 2000 (USA) -- A group of 12 teenagers from various backgrounds enroll at the American Ballet Academy in New York to make it as ballet dancers and each one deals with the problems and stress of training and getting ahead in the
Center Stage (2000) ::: 6.7/10 -- PG-13 | 1h 55min | Drama, Music, Romance | 12 May 2000 (USA) -- A group of 12 teenagers from various backgrounds enroll at the American Ballet Academy in New York to make it as ballet dancers and each one deals with the problems and stress of training and getting ahead in the world of dance. Director: Nicholas Hytner Writer:
Girl (2018) ::: 7.1/10 -- R | 1h 45min | Drama | 15 March 2019 (USA) -- A promising teenage dancer enrolls at a prestigious ballet school while grappling with her gender dysphoria. Director: Lukas Dhont Writers: Lukas Dhont (screenplay), Angelo Tijssens (screenplay) Stars:
Limelight (1952) ::: 8.1/10 -- G | 2h 17min | Drama, Music, Romance | 31 October 1952 (France) -- A fading comedian and a suicidally despondent ballet dancer must look to each other to find purpose and hope in their lives. Director: Charles Chaplin Writers: Charles Chaplin (original story), Charles Chaplin (screenplay by)
Mao's Last Dancer (2009) ::: 7.3/10 -- PG | 1h 57min | Biography, Drama, Music | 1 October 2010 (USA) -- In Maoist China, a boy is taken from his family and trained to become a dancer, but everything he knows is challenged when he is chosen to attend a ballet summer school in Houston, Texas. Director: Bruce Beresford Writers:
Shall We Dance (1937) ::: 7.5/10 -- Approved | 1h 49min | Comedy, Musical, Romance | 7 May 1937 (USA) -- A ballet dancer and a showgirl fake a marriage for publicity purposes, then fall in love. Director: Mark Sandrich Writers: Allan Scott (screen play), Ernest Pagano (screen play) | 3 more
So You Think You Can Dance ::: TV-PG | 1h | Game-Show, Music, Reality-TV | TV Series (2005 ) -- Dancers skilled in everything from ballroom and ballet to salsa, jive, hip-hop and krumping, all compete to be named the best. Dancers must impress the judges with their moves and rigorous ... S Creators:
Suspiria (1977) ::: 7.4/10 -- R | 1h 32min | Horror | 12 August 1977 (USA) -- An American newcomer to a prestigious German ballet academy comes to realize that the school is a front for something sinister amid a series of grisly murders. Director: Dario Argento Writers: Dario Argento (screenplay), Daria Nicolodi (screenplay) Stars:
The Red Shoes (1948) ::: 8.1/10 -- Not Rated | 2h 15min | Drama, Music, Romance | 6 September 1948 (UK) -- A young ballet dancer is torn between the man she loves and her pursuit to become a prima ballerina. Directors: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger Writers: Hans Christian Andersen (fairy tale), Emeric Pressburger (original
The Turning Point (1977) ::: 6.9/10 -- PG | 1h 59min | Drama, Romance | 18 November 1977 (USA) -- When her daughter joins a ballet company, a former dancer is forced to confront her long-ago decision to give up the stage to have a family. Director: Herbert Ross Writer: Arthur Laurents
White Nights (1985) ::: 6.7/10 -- PG-13 | 2h 16min | Drama, Music | 6 December 1985 (USA) -- A Russian American ballet dancer's airplane is forced to land in USSR, where he's "repatriated". He stays with an American man married to a Russian. Will the American help him flee USSR? Director: Taylor Hackford Writers:
https://dreamfiction.fandom.com/wiki/Touhou_Gensou_Rondo:_Bullet_Ballet_(Drillimation)
https://fnaf-sister-location.fandom.com/wiki/Angry_Ballet
https://gilmoregirls.fandom.com/wiki/Miss_Patty's_School_of_Ballet
https://glee.fandom.com/wiki/At_the_Ballet
https://literature.fandom.com/wiki/Ballet_Shoes
https://logos.fandom.com/wiki/Houston_Ballet
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Ballet
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Beginning_Ballet
https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Ballet
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Mon_Calamari_Aquatic_Ballet
Princess Tutu -- -- Hal Film Maker -- 38 eps -- Original -- Comedy Drama Fantasy Magic Mystery Romance -- Princess Tutu Princess Tutu -- In a fairy tale come to life, the clumsy, sweet, and gentle Ahiru (Japanese for "duck") seems like an unlikely protagonist. In reality, Ahiru is just as magical as the talking cats and crocodiles that inhabit her town—for Ahiru really is a duck! Transformed by the mysterious Drosselmeyer into a human girl, Ahiru soon learns the reason for her existence. Using her magical egg-shaped pendant, Ahiru can transform into Princess Tutu—a beautiful and talented ballet dancer whose dances relieve people of the turmoil in their hearts. With her newfound ability, Ahiru accepts the challenge of collecting the lost shards of her prince's heart, for long ago he had shattered it in order to seal an evil raven away for all eternity. -- -- Princess Tutu is a tale of heroes and their struggle against fate. Their beliefs, their feelings, and ultimately their actions will determine whether this fairy tale can reach its "happily ever after." -- -- 133,320 8.14
Princess Tutu -- -- Hal Film Maker -- 38 eps -- Original -- Comedy Drama Fantasy Magic Mystery Romance -- Princess Tutu Princess Tutu -- In a fairy tale come to life, the clumsy, sweet, and gentle Ahiru (Japanese for "duck") seems like an unlikely protagonist. In reality, Ahiru is just as magical as the talking cats and crocodiles that inhabit her town—for Ahiru really is a duck! Transformed by the mysterious Drosselmeyer into a human girl, Ahiru soon learns the reason for her existence. Using her magical egg-shaped pendant, Ahiru can transform into Princess Tutu—a beautiful and talented ballet dancer whose dances relieve people of the turmoil in their hearts. With her newfound ability, Ahiru accepts the challenge of collecting the lost shards of her prince's heart, for long ago he had shattered it in order to seal an evil raven away for all eternity. -- -- Princess Tutu is a tale of heroes and their struggle against fate. Their beliefs, their feelings, and ultimately their actions will determine whether this fairy tale can reach its "happily ever after." -- -- -- Licensor: -- ADV Films, Sentai Filmworks -- 133,320 8.14
RideBack -- -- Madhouse -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Action Drama Mecha School Sci-Fi -- RideBack RideBack -- In the future, an organization called the GGP has taken control of the world. Rin Ogata was a promising up-and-coming ballet dancer, but suffered a serious injury while dancing and decided to quit. Years later in college, she comes across a club building and soon finds herself intrigued by a transforming motorcycle-like robotic vehicle called a "Rideback". She soon finds that her unique ballet skills with balance and finesse make her a born natural on a Rideback. However, those same skills also get her into serious trouble with the government. -- -- (Source: Wikipedia) -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- 42,901 7.29
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Muusika-_ja_balletikooli_ehitus.IMG_20210413_123350(1).jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Programma_van_de_opvoering_van_het_ballet_"La_Gamme_d'Amour"_-_Schouwburg_Oostende_17_december_1932,_James_Ensor,_Mu.ZEE_Oostende,_SM002264a.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Programma_van_de_opvoering_van_het_ballet_"La_Gamme_d'Amour"_-_Schouwburg_Oostende_17_december_1932,_James_Ensor,_Mu.ZEE_Oostende,_SM002264b.jpg
Aerial Ballet
After the Rain (ballet)
Agon (ballet)
Alberta Ballet Company
Alexander Pushkin (ballet dancer)
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (ballet)
Alonzo King LINES Ballet
American Ballet
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American Midwest Ballet
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Amherst Ballet Theatre Company
A Midsummer Night's Dream (ballet)
Andantino (ballet)
An Evening with the Royal Ballet
Anna Karenina (Eifman ballet)
Anne Heaton (ballet dancer)
Apollo (ballet)
Arabesque (ballet position)
Aspendos International Opera and Ballet Festival
Aspen Santa Fe Ballet
Astarte (ballet)
Atlanta Ballet
Atlanta Festival Ballet
Atlantic Ballet Theatre of Canada
Bacchus and Ariadne (ballet)
Ballet
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Ballet Arizona
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Ballet BC
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Ballet boot
BalletBoyz
Ballet Comique de la Reine
Ballet company
Ballet Cymru
Ballet d'action
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Ballet de cour
Ballet gyptien
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Ballet Folklrico de Mxico
Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon
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Ballet in Turkey
Ballet Jrgen Canada
Ballet Magnificat!
Ballet master
Ballet Mcanique
BalletMet
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Ballet National de Marseille
Ballet of the 20th Century
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Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo
Ballet San Jose
Ballet shoe
Ballet shoes (disambiguation)
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Ballet Theatre of Maryland
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Bayerisches Staatsballett
Bayou (ballet)
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Bobbie of the Ballet
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Boston Ballet
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Broken Wings (ballet)
Bugaku (ballet)
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Carousel (ballet)
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lgie (ballet)
lisabeth Ballet
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tudes (ballet)
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I'm Old Fashioned (ballet)
Il Balletto di Bronzo
In Memory Of ... (ballet)
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La Esmeralda (ballet)
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Le ballet
Le ballet (Celine Dion song)
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Le tombeau de Couperin (ballet)
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Lexington Ballet Company
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Liebeslieder Walzer (ballet)
List of 1789 ballet premieres
List of 1870 ballet premieres
List of 1895 ballet premieres
List of 1932 ballet premieres
List of 1933 ballet premieres
List of 1934 ballet premieres
List of 1944 ballet premieres
List of 1945 ballet premieres
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List of 1993 ballet premieres
List of 1994 ballet premieres
List of 1995 ballet premieres
List of 1996 ballet premieres
List of 1997 ballet premieres
List of 1998 ballet premieres
List of 1999 ballet premieres
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Positions of the arms in ballet
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Timeline of ballet
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Who Cares? (ballet)
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X-Ray (ballet)
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