Top 48 Balanchine's Quotes
#1. 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' is one of George Balanchine's greatest creations - and one of the greatest of all story ballets.
Robert Gottlieb
#2. Theo nodded slowly. "You love Balanchine chocolate like I love cacao."
"I wouldn't say love, Theo."
"No, you speak the truth. Love isn't right. It isn't right for me either. Sometimes I hate cacao." Theo looked at me. "You don't love Balanchine chocolate. You are Balanchine chocolate.
Gabrielle Zevin
#3. The pointes for girls, I always say, have to be like an elephant's trunk; strong and yet flexible and soft.
George Balanchine
#5. My actual daddy used to say that if you didn't let some things go, you'd spend your whole life fighting -Anya/Mr. Balanchine
Gabrielle Zevin
#6. I never studied with Balanchine, but his work was very important to me.
Twyla Tharp
#7. Why are you stingy with yourselves? Why are you holding back? What are you saving for - for another time? There are no other times. There is only now. Right now.
George Balanchine
#8. Choreography is simpler than you think. Just go and do, and don't think so much about it. Just make something interesting.
George Balanchine
#9. Most ballet teachers in the United States are terrible. If they were in medicine, everyone would be poisoned.
George Balanchine
#10. In my ballets, woman is first. Men are consorts. God made men to sing the praises of women. They are not equal to men: They are better.
George Balanchine
#11. Dancers are instruments, like a piano the choreographer plays.
George Balanchine
#13. If Balanchine had any secret, it was one that has endured through two hundred years of classical ballet. It is that dancing correctly in three dimensions, on the music, creates the fourth dimension of meaning.
Arlene Croce
#14. The ballet is a purely female thing; it is a woman, a garden of beautiful flowers, and man is the gardener.
George Balanchine
#18. I'm born originally in Toronto, and I have what I call my 'Fame' story. I took a Greyhound bus and went to Alvin Ailey and received Dunham, Horton, Graham technique there, but I could never take my eyes off of Balanchine doing 'Nutcracker'; to me he's the best who ever did it.
Laurieann Gibson
#19. I don't want people who want to dance, I want people who have to dance.
George Balanchine
#23. I think Balanchine and Robbins talk to God and when I call, he's out to lunch.
Bob Fosse
#24. I cannot move, I cannot even want to move, unless I hear the music first.
George Balanchine
#27. Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.
Susan Sontag
#28. Someone once said that dancers work just as hard as policeman, always alert, always tense. But i dont agree with that because policeman don't have to look beautiful at the same time *
George Balanchine
#30. Ballet is important and significant - yes. But first of all, it is a pleasure.
George Balanchine
#31. I don't have a past. I have a continuous present. The past is part of the present, just as the future is. We exist in time.
George Balanchine
#32. I've got more energy now than when I was younger because I know exactly what I want to do.
George Balanchine
#33. Put a man and a girl on stage and there is already a story; a man and two girls, there's already a plot.
George Balanchine
#34. In ballet a complicated story is impossible to tell ... we can't dance synonyms.
George Balanchine
#35. 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
#36. I cherish the ballets made for myself by Mr. Balanchine. He never lost his temper. He was quiet, humble, the genius of the 20th century.
Patricia McBride
#37. At age 14, coming to the U.S., all I knew was American Ballet Theatre, Baryshnikov, Nureyev, and some of the European companies. I barely knew anything about Balanchine.
Carla Korbes
#39. In the beginning, he taught you how to hold your fingers, use your head, hold your shoulders, how you glissade, bourre - the exact way he wanted you to do the steps. It was relearning the whole Balanchine technique.
Patricia McBride
#40. I didn't know if I could act, but I knew I could be a great ballet dancer, and Balanchine put out the carpet for me.
Jacques D'Amboise
#41. I remember my dreams when I was a junior soloist. 'Oh, I hope I don't end here,' I thought. 'I want to do the ballerina in 'Scotch Symphony.' I don't want to be the little Scotch girl.' And I actually went beyond my wildest dreams. I worked with Balanchine. I had ballets choreographed for me.
Patricia McBride
#42. First comes the sweat. Then comes the beauty if you're very lucky and have said your prayers.
George Balanchine
#43. Storyless is not abstract. Two dancers on the stage are enough material for a story; for me, they are already a story in themselves
George Balanchine
#44. It's like the time capsule with everything in it. Or like the seed that when you plant it, becomes the enormous tree with leaves and fruit. Everybody was in that little seed, and so everything can open. The tree of dance is like that. It just takes a long, long time to blossom.
George Balanchine
#45. God creates, I do not create. I assemble and I steal everywhere to do it - from what I see, from what the dancers can do, from what others do.
George Balanchine
#46. 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
#47. What are you waiting for? What are you saving for? Now is all there is.
George Balanchine
#48. I felt that Balanchine was my father towards me. He was the person I most admired and looked up to.
Patricia McBride
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