quotations about dance & dancing
Do a loony-goony dance
'Cross the kitchen floor,
Put something silly in the world
That ain't been there before.
SHEL SILVERSTEIN
A Light in the Attic
And you shall seek me till you reach
The tangled tide advancing,
And you shall find upon the beach
The traces of my dancing
STELLA BENSON
Twenty
Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
attributed, Telling It Like It Is
Dancing? Y-yes ... dancing ... I love ... dancing ... (It makes me look like a coma victim being stood up and zapped with a cattle prod).
JESSE ARMSTRONG & SAM BAIN
Peep Show
Come, knit hands, and beat the ground
In a light fantastic round.
JOHN MILTON
Comus
You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.
MERCE CUNNINGHAM
attributed, Dancing Lives
He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Richard III
Time and dancing are twins, begot together; time is the first-born, being the measure of all moving; and dancing, the moving of all in measure.
IBRAHIM I
attributed, Day's Collacon
On with the dance! let joy be unconfined;
No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet
To chase the glowing hours with flying feet.
LORD BYRON
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
Heaven, I'm in heaven
And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak
And I seem to find the happiness I seek
When we're out together dancing cheek to cheek
IRVING BERLIN
"Cheek to Cheek"
Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.
WILLIAM STAFFORD
Learning to Live in the World: Earth Poems
Could not the art of dance, at its best, be read as gesturing toward the resurrection of the body celebrated in 1 Corinthians 15, a fully physical body certainly, but a body whose life vastly surpasses that of the body of this life ... the body riven by sin and running toward death?
JEREMY BEGBIE
Redeeming Transcendence in the Arts
Those who teach children to dance, instruct them in the quick steps to perdition.
J. KNAPP
attributed, Day's Collacon
If you look at a dancer in silence, his or her body will be the music. If you turn the music on, that body will become an extension of what you're hearing.
JUDITH JAMISON
Dancing Spirit
Never trust a man who can dance.
E. L. JAMES
Fifty Shades of Grey
Dancing is an active motion of the body, which proceedeth from the lightness of the heart.
A. FANDANGO
"Of Dancing"
As a man danced so the drums were beaten for him.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Things Fall Apart
Faeries, come take me out of this dull world,
For I would ride with you upon the wind,
Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,
And dance upon the mountains like a flame.
W. B. YEATS
The Land of Heart's Desire
Someone once said that dancers work just as hard as policemen, always alert, always tense, but see, policemen don't have to be beautiful at the same time.
GEORGE BALANCHINE
attributed, Little Book of Dance Quotations
Dance, dance, as long as ye may,
Nature gets up a great ballet around us;
Her stage-room is vast, so come, trip it away,
For Life's Opera cannot be perfect without us.
ELIZA COOK
"Dancing-Song", Eliza Cook's Journal