Dance Quotes by Lincoln Kirstein

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.

— Lincoln Kirstein

She was chronologically in luck. She corresponded to necessity.

— Lincoln Kirstein

The candid camera is the greatest liar in the photographic family… It is anarchic, naïve, and superficial.

— Lincoln Kirstein

“If there is a hero, it is choreography.”

— Lincoln Kirstein

While photography to Cartier-Bresson is constantly an intuitive process, it is never purely instinctive. It is founded on continuous intellection, on ceaseless consideration during…

— Lincoln Kirstein

Transplanting the ballet to the United States is like trying to raise a palm tree in Dakota.

— Lincoln Kirstein

Harvard was a kind of luxurious afternoon.

— Lincoln Kirstein

“I mean, if you have any idea of any kind of complexity or immensity or destiny, of general order, you're put in a position…

— Lincoln Kirstein

Ballet dancers are a self-chosen elite. To survive and surmount years of disciplinary preparation and seasons of even more arduous performance requires rigid determination…

— Lincoln Kirstein

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

— Lincoln Kirstein

Dance design is not simply one element; it is that without which ballet cannot exist. As aria is to opera, words to poetry, color…

— Lincoln Kirstein

In liberal democracy and anxious anarchy, the traditional classic dance, compact of aristocratic authority and absolute freedom in a necessity of order, has never…

— Lincoln Kirstein

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…

— Lincoln Kirstein

If one had to define one essential gift with which a dancer needs to be endowed, there might be a rush of answers. A…

— Lincoln Kirstein