I've always had the idea that we were conducting a military operation. It always seemed to me to be in a state of emergency.

240

He was trained as a dancer, and he had both a dancer's body and a dancer's capacity. He incarnated for me the most appealing and tragic aspects of American lower-class life.

214

A repertory, a patrimony of ballets, tended as carefully as the collection of 600-year-old bonsai in Tokyo's Imperial Palace conservatory, is not replaced; it is preserved, maintained, refreshed to give rebirth by grafting and seedlings.

211

In liberal democracy and anxious anarchy, the traditional classic dance, compact of aristocratic authority and absolute freedom in a necessity of order, has never been so promising as an independent expression as it is today.

209

The domain of the ballet dancer is not earth but air.

197

She was chronologically in luck. She corresponded to necessity.

124