excerpts

"'Why do you want to dance?'
'Why do you want to live?'
'Well I don't know exactly why, er, but I must.'
'That's my answer too.'"
-The Red Shoes

"'How would you define ballet, Lady Neston?'
'Well, one might call it the poetry of motion perhaps, or...'
'One might. But for me it is a great deal more. For me it is a religion.'"
-The Red Shoes

"Learning ballet is wonderful for children even if they never become dancers. I tis wonderful because it teaches discipline, grace, and manners."
-Ballet: An Eight-Year Course

"Ballet dancers are a self-chosen elite. To survive and surmount years of disciplinary perparation and seasons of even more arduous performance requires rigid determination and almost mindless self-abnegation. One other factor is difficult to predetermine: without a certain admixture of hysteria -- sometimes masking as self-obsession, sometimes even counterfeiting incipient madness -- performers,a t once acrobats, artists, and animals, make little public impression."
-Four Centuries of Ballet