Ballet Dancer Quotes & Sayings

Edgar Degas's famous sculpture, 'Little Dancer Aged Fourteen,' served as my muse for 'The Painted Girls.' I came upon a television documentary on the work, and as someone who held the sculpture in high esteem and who largely considered ballet to be the high-minded pursuit of privileged young girls, I was struck by what I would learn. — Cathy Marie Buchanan

I really wanted to make it as a ballet dancer to make my mom proud. But it didn't happen. — Tracy Anderson

I was a ballet dancer for so long, but when I realized I had reached my limit and that I couldn't go any further I knew I wanted to pursue acting. That's one thing you don't use as a dancer - your voice. And the one thing I use most in my life is my voice so it's wonderful to get to express myself artistically through the biggest instrument I use. — Zoe Saldana

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

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

I wanted to be a male ballet dancer. — Scott Thompson

I trained in every form of dance - started as a tap dancer when I was a kid, then contemporary, ballet, ballroom, everything. Russian, Swedish. — Nigel Lythgoe

My background is somewhat unusual, as I trained to be a ballet dancer. I worked in the theatre for eight or nine years as a contemporary dancer. But as an actor one does read Shakespeare and does try to learn the classics. — William Kempe

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

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

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

Real men don't lift weights, they lift women. — Every Male Ballet Dancer

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

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

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

I've never danced professionally as a ballet dancer, but all of my training is ballet, and I am a Fosse dancer. — Bebe Neuwirth

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

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

Being a former dancer, classical dancer, it informed me as a human being just in terms of the grace I guess. Ballet is a very graceful form of art. You also become very aware of your body and your mind and your body is working in conjunction. That kind of helps you in acting as well. It's not only using your mind, it's like making your mind communicate this character into your body so that you can bring it to life and physicalize it. — Zoe Saldana

Yet for a moment it seemed to him that the men who had dragged marble from Italy and porphyry from Portugal, who had ransacked the jungle for its rarest woods and paid their millions to build this opulent and fantastical theatre, had done so in order that a young girl with loose brown hair should move across its stage, drawing her future from its empty air. — Eva Ibbotson

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

I did community theater in Georgia and called myself a ballet dancer. — Laura Slade Wiggins

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

I've got no plans to be a ballet dancer at the moment. — Neil Patrick Harris

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

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

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

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

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

I know that I'm talented, and I know that I'm not in American Ballet Theater because I'm black - I'm here because I'm a gifted dancer. — Misty Copeland

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

I trained as a ballet dancer and fell in love with Rudolf Nureyev; I thought him the most beautiful creature. My mum had to break it to me that not only was he gay, but he was dead. — Jessica Brown Findlay

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

Dancing is creating a sculpture that is visible only for a moment. — Erol Ozan

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

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

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

I used to get so comfortable running the hurdles, I was just like a ballet dancer going out there and going through the routines. — Rod Milburn

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

Figure skating has been a great influence for me. I took dance at the School of American Ballet, which helped my own skating. And whether you are a skater or a dancer, without sounding narcissistic, it is all about looking in the mirror. — Vera Wang

Misty Copeland is making history. During American Ballet Theatre's current season at the Metropolitan Opera House, Copeland will alight on that storied Lincoln Center stage, making her New York debut as the Swan Queen in the iconic masterpiece Swan Lake - a crowning achievement for any dancer, regardless of the color of her skin. — Heather Watts

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

I want to be a lawyer, a dancer, an actress, a mother, a wife, a children's author, a distance runner, a poet, a pianist, a pet store owner, an astronaut, an environmental and humanitarian activist, a psychiatrist, a ballet teacher, and the first woman president. — Rachel Corrie

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

Making the ballet really taught me how to get things moving. Ballet dancers don't stand still. — Guy Maddin

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

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

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

I'm a dancer, so I do four hours of dance a week of ballet, jazz, hip hop, contemporary. I also play the piano and I just started learning the guitar. — Ryan Newman

All dancers have a cumulative tendency, because each beat of the tom-tom has an almost irresistible appeal. Soon, those who were just spectators would dance too. — Camara Laye

If I had to reflect on the finest classical male ballet dancers of my time, Vladimir Vasiliev of the Bolshoi and the Danish dancer Eric Bruhn were, I feel, without peer. — Jacques D'Amboise

Beauty, like male ballet dancers, makes some men afraid. — Mordecai Richler

My dream was to become a ballet dancer, but after a year in bed with rheumatic fever at 13, I had grown too tall, and had no muscle tone left. I tried a ballet class and couldn't even do a plie without falling over. It was my first death. — Carmen Dell'Orefice

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

In swimming at my level it's about control of the small movements. A good ballet dancer floats across the stage, the best sprinters virtually abolish gravity. All motion occurs in the right direction. — Alexander Dale Oen

I wasn't a dancer learning to play Baby Houseman. I was Baby Houseman learning to play a dancer. I was someone who'd never done any Latin dance. I'd taken jazz classes and ballet growing up in New York, so I had dance in me, and I knew I loved it, but I'd never done a dance audition. — Jennifer Grey

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

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

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

It'd be very difficult to cast me as a ballet dancer. Everybody is, in some sense, controlled by their size and their gender. I'm not going to be allowed to play the part that Denzel Washington plays. — Brian Dennehy

If a ballet dancer falls over, it's knowing how to get out looking clumsy that counts. — Ritchie Blackmore

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

'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

I trained as a ballet dancer till I was 18, so I would really like to get back to it. I'd love it if there was a part that meant I could do both acting and ballet, as they're both so close to my heart. — Jessica Brown Findlay

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

I had been a ballet dancer and never could make a living, and just being so excited that I got to, all of a sudden, live as an actor. — Lea Thompson

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

I was a dancer from a young age. My parents were dancers; we were taken to a lot of ballet as children. It occurred to me that what I liked more than dancing the steps was acting the story of whatever particular performance I was taking part in. — Elizabeth Debicki

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

I began dancing when I was 7 years old. I was told that I had the perfect ballet dancer's 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

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

Peter smiled as Concheetah sashayed across the ballroom floor
Concheetah sashayed towards him, wriggling her hips, full lips in a pout, followed obediently by the tentative, Tapping Ted dressed in tight shorts and singlet. Tapping? Tapping because he always wore conspicuous, tap-dancing shoes in the club.
Was Ted going to rip up the stage as a mincing Irish dancer or maybe perform a Gene Kelly routine or the Swan Lake ballet in taps? It was terrible to imagine. Peter bit his lip at that thought, hoping he wouldn't burst into howls of laughter.
He had noted after coming to several shows, that Ted usually stood at the side of the stage ready with a drink of champagne and an encouraging word and a dry towel to mop Her Highness's face. And he always cried during the
show's finale, Abba's Dancing Queen. Poor Tapping Ted. — T.W. Lawless

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

My personal trainer is an ex-dancer so we do a lot of ballet and jazz. — Rachel Stevens

If I'm at a party, I can put on some crazy dance moves. However, it's not synchronized, beautiful or choreographed like a ballet dancer. I'd love to be graceful like that. — Sierra McCormick

The greater the fool the better the dancer. — Theodore Hook

So many people report to be contemporary dancers, and they're not. They are sort of jazz dancers that feel like they're throwing a bit of classical in there. I mean, a true contemporary dancer has got ballet as their base and classical ballet, and that is their base. And then they choose to extemporize on that and go into a contemporary world. — Nigel Lythgoe

I wanted to be a ballet dancer. I was bad - I'm not very coordinated. But I always wished I could have been a dancer. — Gia Coppola

I think most dancers would agree that the art of ballet chooses the dancer, not the other way around. — Kevin McKenzie

I was a ballet dancer growing up and that's what I was convinced I would be. — Candice Swanepoel

Melissa Barak, an ex-City Ballet dancer and sometime choreographer, has put together an unspeakably dopey and incompetent mess called 'Call Me Ben,' combining ultra-generic dance, terrible dialogue and disastrous storytelling, about the founding of Las Vegas by the gangster Bugsy Siegel, who insists, violently, on being addressed as 'Ben.' — Robert Gottlieb

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

Sabine gestured to him with the half-eaten crust. "I like him. Not sure why he's wasting his time with the pole dancer, though."
Tod laughed out loud and I groaned. "Sophie takes ballet and jazz. She's not a pole dancer."
"There's more money in pole dancing," Sabine insisted. — Rachel Vincent

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

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

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

I've won my last four matches by knockout. Out of 30 fights, I've won more than 20 by knockout. I think that a ballet dancer wouldn't win by knockout. — Sergio Martinez

I started dancing when I was five, and I trained intensively as a competitive dancer up until the end of high school. I did all genres, and later on a did a lot of extra ballet on top of that. I actually got accepted to Julliard for dance during my senior year, but I ultimately turned it down to come to L.A. to act. — Jacob Artist

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

I'm never going to get married. I'm going to be a ballet-dancer. But don't tell anybody. — Leo Tolstoy

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

...It Isn't actually much of an encouragement to me to read the stories about Jesus. I might as well take encouragement from watching a great athlete run a four-minute mile. Sure, it's a fine sight, but at my age and with my weight I would be lucky to do a mile in 10 minutes, let alone four. I can watch a ballet dancer on stage with great delight, not because I can copy him, but precisely because I know I can't. — N. T. Wright

Up until I was about 12, I was a ballet dancer and a basketball player. — Katherine McNamara

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

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

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

I have been curious about the mind and body for as long as I can remember. I was a gymnast, a ballet dancer, and a philosophy and physical therapy major. Following the thread of curiosity about mind and body, I took my first yoga class in 1980 and knew from the start that it would be a lifelong passion. — Rodney Yee

An ex-ABT ballerina, while staging a ballet for the company, once followed a dancer into the bathroom to deliver notes through the stall door. She was known to bark - literally, like a dog - during private rehearsals. — Sascha Radetsky

Just as experience dictates to the ballet teacher the length of time necessary to train his students, so the horse, too, needs time to mature into a great four legged dancer. This fact cannot be obliterated by seeming successes that supposedly prove the opposite. For, even if someone should succeed in training a horse to high school level by the age of eight, this individual occurrence cannot shake the foundations of the classical art of riding, if this dressage horse is completely unsound and unusable by the age of ten. — Alois Podhajsky

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. — Amanda Schull