Quotes about dancing
page 11

Pat Condell photo

“If you're looking at the Bible for a guide to living a compassionate, wise and humane life, well, frankly you've got more chance of finding a lap dancing club in Mecca or a virgin in a catholic orphanage.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"What have I got against religion?" (4 March 2007) http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=oSZYN8UV6yg
2007

Grant Morrison photo
Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar photo
Katy Perry photo

“Last Friday night,
Yeah we danced on tabletops.
And we took too many shots,
Think we kissed but I forgot.Last Friday night,
Yeah we maxed our credit cards.
And got kicked out of the bar,
So we hit the boulevard.”

Katy Perry (1984) American singer, songwriter and actress

Last Friday Night, written by Katy Perry, Lukasz Gottwald, Max Martin, and Bonnie McKee
Song lyrics, Teenage Dream (2010)

Agatha Christie photo
Fred Astaire photo

“He is the most interesting, the most inventive, the most elegant dancer of our times… you see a little bit of Astaire in everybody's dancing--a pause here, a move there. It was all Astaire's originally.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

George Balanchine, quoted in Thomas, Bob. Astaire, the Man, The Dancer. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1985. ISBN 0297784021 p. 33.

Dorothy Wordsworth photo
Henry Rollins photo
Anthony Burgess photo

“Defiling their shadows, infidels, accursed of Allah, with fingernails that are foot-long daggers, with mouths agape like cauldrons full of teeth on the boil, with eyes all fire, shaitans possessed of Iblis, clanking into their wars all linked, like slaves, with iron chains. Murad Bey, the huge, the single-blowed ox-beheader, saw without too much surprise mild-looking pale men dressed in blue, holding guns, drawn up in squares six deep as though in some massed dance depictive of orchard walls. At the corners of the squares were heavy giins and gunners. There did not seem to be many horsemen. Murad said a prayer within, raised his scimitar to heaven and yelled a fierce and holy word. The word was taken up, many thousandfold, and in a kind of gloved thunder the Mamelukes threw themselves on to the infidel right and nearly broke it. But the squares healed themselves at once, and the cavalry of the faithful crashed in three avenging prongs along the fire-spitting avenues between the walls. A great gun uttered earthquake language at them from within a square, and, rearing and cursing the curses of the archangels of Islam on to the uncircumcized, they wheeled and swung towards their protective village of Embabeh. There they encountered certain of the blue-clad infidel horde on the flat roofs of the houses, coughing musket-fire at them. But then disaster sang along their lines from the rear as shell after shell crunched and the Mamelukes roared in panic and burden to the screams of their terrified mounts, to whose ears these noises were new. Their rear dissolving, their retreat cut off, most sought the only way, that of the river. They plunged in, horseless, seeking to swim across to join the inactive horde of Ibrahim, waiting for. action that could now never come. Murad Bey, with such of his horsemen as were left, yelped off inland to Gizeh.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, Napoleon Symphony (1974)

James I of Scotland photo
Esther Williams photo
Warren Farrell photo

“Disco dancing is really dancing for people who hate dancing, since the beat is so monotonous that only the champions can find interesting ways of reacting to it. There is no syncopation, just the steady thump of a giant moron knocking in an endless nail.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'The flying feet of Frankie Foo'
Essays and reviews, The Crystal Bucket (1982)

William Wordsworth photo

“Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Stanza 2.
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww260.html (1804)

Fred Astaire photo

“I don't make love by kissing, I make love by dancing.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

Fred Astaire to Henry Ephron, screenwriter on Daddy Long Legs, as quoted in Ephron, Henry. We Thought We Could Do Anything: The Life of Screenwriters Phoebe and Henry Ephron, New York: Norton, 1977, p. 131. (M).

Cat Stevens photo

“She moves like and angel
And seven evening stars
Dance through the window
Of her universal house”

Cat Stevens (1948) British singer-songwriter

Angelsea
Song lyrics, Catch Bull at Four (1972)

Hayley Jensen photo
Chuck Palahniuk photo
Elie Wiesel photo
Gloria Estefan photo
Diora Baird photo
Alois Hába photo
Stephen Vincent Benét photo
Akira Ifukube photo

“In televisionland we are all sophisticated enough now to realize that every statistic has an equal and opposite statistic somewhere in the universe. It is not a candidate's favorite statistic per se that engages us, but the assurance with which he can use it.
We are testing the candidates for self-confidence, for "Presidentiality" in statistical bombardment. It doesn't really matter if their statistics be homemade. What settles the business is the cool with which they are dropped.
And so, as the second half hour treads the decimaled path toward the third hour, we become aware of being locked in a tacit conspiracy with the candidates. We know their statistics go to nothing of importance, and they know we know, and we know they know we know.
There is total but unspoken agreement that the "debate," the arguments which are being mustered here, are of only the slightest importance.
As in some primitive ritual, we all agree — candidates and onlookers — to pretend we are involved in a debate, although the real exercise is a test of style and manners. Which of the competitors can better execute the intricate maneuvers prescribed by a largely irrelevant ritual?
This accounts for the curious lack of passion in both performers. Even when Ford accuses Carter of inconsistency, it is done in a flat, emotionless, game-playing style. The delivery has the tuneless ring of an old press release from the Republican National Committee. Just so, when Carter has an opportunity to set pulses pounding by denouncing the Nixon pardon, he dances delicately around the invitation like a maiden skirting a bog.
We judge that both men judge us to be drained of desire for passion in public life, to be looking for Presidents who are cool and noninflammable. They present themselves as passionless technocrats using an English singularly devoid of poetry, metaphor and even coherent forthright declaration.
Caught up in the conspiracy, we watch their coolness with fine technical understanding and, in the final half hour, begin asking each other for technical judgments. How well is Carter exploiting the event to improve our image of him? Is Ford's television manner sufficiently self-confident to make us sense him as "Presidential"?
It is quite extraordinary. Here we are, fully aware that we are being manipulated by image projectionists, yet happily asking ourselves how obligingly we are submitting to the manipulation. It is as though a rat running a maze were more interested in the psychologist's charts on his behavior than in getting the cheese at the goal line.”

Russell Baker (1925–2019) writer and satirst from the United States

"And All of Us So Cool" (p.340)
There's a Country in My Cellar (1990)

Bruno Schulz photo

“An infernal storm-cloud of feathers, wings, and screeches flew up, in the midst of which, Adela, looking like a furious mænad, half-obscured by the spinning of her thyrsus, danced a dance of destruction.”

Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) Polish novelist and painter

“The Birds” http://www.schulzian.net/translation/shops/birds.htm
His father, Adela (the domestic servant)

Mickey Spillane photo
Arthur Hugh Clough photo

“Dance on, dance on, we see, we see
Youth goes, alack, and with it glee,
A boy the old man ne’er can be;
Maternal thirty scarce can find
The sweet sixteen long left behind.”

Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–1861) English poet

Youth and Age http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/C/CloughArthurHugh/verse/poemsproseremains/youthage.html, st. 1.

Paul Simon photo

“Come on, take me to the Mardi Gras,
Where the people sing and play,
Where the music is elite and there's dancing in the street,
Both night and day.”

Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer

Take Me To The Mardi Gras
Song lyrics, There Goes Rhymin' Simon (1973)

William Allingham photo

“Mary kept the belt of love, and oh, but she was gay!
She danced a jig, she sung a song that took my heart away.”

William Allingham (1824–1889) Irish man of letters and poet

Lovely Mary Donnelly; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Peter Greenaway photo
Vyjayanthimala photo

“But first I was made to learn music, because music and dance go together. You can sing, but you can’t dance without music…”

Vyjayanthimala (1936) Indian actress, politician & dancer

In "There's no slowing down for Vyjayanthimala."

Chuck Berry photo

“Oh Carol, don't let him steal your heart away
I'm gonna learn to dance if it takes me all night and day”

Chuck Berry (1926–2017) American rock-and-roll musician

"Carol" (1958)
Song lyrics

Ann Coulter photo
William Golding photo
Rex Stout photo
Rose Fyleman photo
Bruce Springsteen photo
William Cowper photo
Stevie Wonder photo
Kathy Griffin photo
Jean Dubuffet photo
Jesper Kyd photo
Arundhati Roy photo

“He is Karna, whom the world has abandoned. Karna Alone. Condemned goods. A prince raised in poverty. Born to die unfairly, unarmed and alone at the hands of his brother. Majestic in his complete despair. Praying on the banks of the Ganga. Stoned out of his skull.
Then Kunti appeared. She too was a man, but a man grown soft and womanly, a man with breasts, from doing female parts for years. Her movements were fluid. Full of women. Kunti, too, was stoned. High on the same shared joints. She had come to tell Karna a story.
Karna inclined his beautiful head and listened.
Red-eyed, Kunti danced for him. She told him of a young woman who had been granted a boon. A secret mantra that she could use to choose a lover from among the gods. Of how, with the imprudence of youth, the woman decided to test it to see if it really worked. How she stood alone in an empty field, turned her face to the heavens and recited the mantra. The words had scarcely left her foolish lips, Kunti said, when Surya, the God of Day, appeared before her. The young woman, bewitched by the beauty of the shimmering young god, gave herself to him. Nine months later she bore him a son. The baby was born sheathed in light, with gold earrings in his ears and a gold breastplate on his chest, engraved with the emblem of the sun.
The young mother loved her first-born son deeply, Kunti said, but she was unmarried and couldn't keep him. She put him in a reed basket and cast him away in a river. The child was found downriver by Adhirata, a charioteer. And named Karna.
Karna looked up to Kunti. Who was she? Who was my mother? Tell me where she is. Take me to her.
Kunti bowed her head. She's here, she said. Standing before you.
Karna's elation and anger at the revelation. His dance of confusion and despair. Where were you, he asked her, when I needed you the most? Did you ever hold me in your arms? Did you feed me? Did you ever look for me? Did you wonder where I might be?
In reply Kunti took the regal face in her hands, green the face, red the eyes, and kissed him on his brow. Karna shuddered in delight. A warrior reduced to infancy. The ecstasy of that kiss. He dispatched it to the ends of his body. To his toes. His fingertips. His lovely mother's kiss. Did you know how much I missed you? Rahel could see it coursing through his veins, as clearly as an egg travelling down an ostrich's neck.
A travelling kiss whose journey was cut short by dismay when Karna realised that his mother had revealed herself to him only to secure the safety of her five other, more beloved sons - the Pandavas - poised on the brink of their epic battle with their one hundred cousins. It is them that Kunti sought to protect by announcing to Karna that she was his mother. She had a promise to extract.
She invoked the Love Laws.”

pages 232-233.
The God of Small Things (1997)

Thorstein Veblen photo

“In point of substantial merit the law school belongs in the modern university no more than a school of fencing or dancing.”

Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) American academic

Veblen (1918) The Higher Learning in America. p. 155

Bryant Gumbel photo
Scott Lynch photo
Jack Johnson (musician) photo
Colin Wilson photo
Merce Cunningham photo
Fred Astaire photo
Henry Fielding photo
Theodor Mommsen photo

“The earliest achievement of this (of equality and the restriction on the powers of the constitutionally mandated magistrates), the most ancient opposition in Rome, consisted in the abolition of the life-tenure of the presidency of the community; in other words, in the abolition of the monarchy… Not only in Rome (but all over the Italian peninsula) … we find the rulers for life of an earlier epoch superseded in after times by annual magistrates. In this light the reasons which led to the substitution of the consuls for kings in Rome need no explanation. The organism of the ancient Greek and Italian polity through its own action and by a sort of natural necessity produced the limitation of the life-presidency to a shortened, and for the most part an annual, term… Simple, however, as was the cause of the change, it might be brought about in various ways, resolution (of the community),.. or the rule might voluntarily abdicate; or the people might rise in rebellion against a tyrannical ruler, and expel him. It was in this latter way that the monarchy was terminated in Rome. For however much the history of the expulsion of the last Tarquinius, "the proud", may have been interwoven with anecdotes and spun out into a romance, it is not in its leading outlines to be called in question. Tradition credibly enough indicates as the causes of the revolt, that the king neglected to consult the senate and to complete its numbers; that he pronounced sentences of capital punishment and confiscation without advising with his counsellors(sic); that he accumulated immense stores of grain in his granaries, and exacted from the burgesses military labours and task-work beyond what was due… we are (in light of the ignorance of historical facts around the abolition of the monarchy) fortunately in possession of a clearer light as to the nature of the change which was made in the constitution (after the expulsion of the monarchy). The royal power was by no means abolished, as is shown by the fact that, when a vacancy occurred, a "temporary king" (Interrex) was nominated as before. The one life-king was simply replaced by two [one year] kings, who called themselves generals (praetores), or judges…, or merely colleagues (Consuls) [literally, "Those who leap or dance together"]. The collegiate principle, from which this last - and subsequently most current - name of the annual kings was derived, assumed in their case an altogether peculiar form. The supreme power was not entrusted to the two magistrates conjointly, but each consul possessed and exercised it for himself as fully and wholly as it had been possessed and exercised by the king; and, although a partition of functions doubtless took place from the first - the one consul for instance undertaking the command of the army, and the other the administration of justice - that partition was by no means binding, and each of the colleagues was legally at liberty to interfere at any time in the province of the other.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Vol. 1, Book II , Chapter 1. "Change of the Constitution" Translated by W.P. Dickson
The History of Rome - Volume 1

Charles Dickens photo

“Well, every one for himself, and Providence for us all--as the elephant said when he danced among the chickens.”

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) English writer and social critic and a Journalist

Charles Reade, A Simpleton (1873)
Misattributed

Rukmini Devi Arundale photo

“Many people have said many things. I can only say I did not consciously go after dance. It found me.”

Rukmini Devi Arundale (1904–1986) Indian Bharatnatyam dancer

Quotations by 60 Greatest Indians, 1 December 2013, Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology http://resourcecentre.daiict.ac.in/eresources/iresources/quotations.html,

Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo
Danny Tidwell photo

“When I was younger, I got into a lot of trouble. Getting the opportunity to dance really got me out of that.”

Danny Tidwell (1984) American dancer

Kourlas, Gia (July 11, 2007). "So He Knows He Can Dance: A Prince Among Paupers" http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/11/arts/dance/11tidw.html?ex=1341892800&en=c1d5f7826893ae94&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink The New York Times Retrieved August 17, 2007.

Conrad Aiken photo
Charles-Joseph, 7th Prince of Ligne photo

“The congress of Vienna does not walk, but it dances.”

Charles-Joseph, 7th Prince of Ligne (1735–1814) Prince of Ligne

Le congrès ne marche pas, il danse.
Reported in the Edinburgh Review, July 1890, p. 244, which praised it as part of "[o]ne of the Prince de Ligne's speeches that will last forever".

Katie Melua photo

“Dancing is an important function of music, but so is crying.”

Katie Melua (1984) British singer-songwriter

[Jasper Gerard, Me and my motors, http://driving.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/driving/features/article522083.ece, The Sunday Times, 2005-05-19]

DJ Paul photo

“It's an updated version of what's being talked about or danced to today but still with my classic grit to it. Good part about it is the 1990s are back so this was da best time to do it. A lot of artist samplin' Three 6 now, our music was before its time.”

DJ Paul (1977) American rapper and record producer

Interview with DJ Paul – Stream DJ Paul Kom's 'Undergroud, Vol. 17 – For da Summa Album http://www.xxlmag.com/news/2017/09/dj-paul-underground-vol-17-for-da-summa-album/

Pierre Monteux photo
Susan Sontag photo

“Photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing.”

In Plato's Cave, p. 8 http://books.google.com/books?id=B8DktTyeRNkC&q=%22Photography+has+become+almost+as+widely+practiced+an+amusement+as+sex+and+dancing%22&pg=PA8#v=onepage
Previously published as Photography http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1973/oct/18/photography/ in The New York Review of Books, 18 October 1973
On Photography (1977)

David Bowie photo

“Let's dance for fear your grace should fall
Let's dance for fear tonight is all”

David Bowie (1947–2016) British musician, actor, record producer and arranger

Let's Dance
Song lyrics, Let's Dance (1983)

Marcus Tullius Cicero photo

“Almost no one dances sober, unless he is insane.”
Nemo enim fere saltat sobrius, nisi forte insanit.

Pro Murena (Chapter VI, sec. 13)

Kate Bush photo

“We're gonna be laughing about this
We're gonna be dancing around
It's gonna be so good now.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, Aerial (2005), A Sky of Honey (Disc 2)

Preity Zinta photo
Fiona Apple photo

“My derring-do allows me to
Dance the rigadoon around you.
But by the time I'm close to you,
I lose my desideratum and now you.”

Fiona Apple (1977) singer-songwriter, musician

To Your Love
Song lyrics, When the Pawn… (1999)

Arthur Rimbaud photo

“Lighter than a cork I danced on the waves.”

Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) French Decadent and Symbolist poet

Plus léger qu'un bouchon j'ai dansé sur les flots.
St. 4
Le Bateau Ivre http://www.mag4.net/Rimbaud/poesies/Boat.html (The Drunken Boat) (1871)

David Bowie photo

“Let's dance — put on your red shoes and dance the blues.
Let's dance — to the song they're playin' on the radio.
Let's sway — while colour lights up your face.
Let's swa —, sway through the crowd to an empty space.”

David Bowie (1947–2016) British musician, actor, record producer and arranger

Let's Dance — Video at YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NelPivNLPZ8
Song lyrics, Let's Dance (1983)

Luise Rainer photo
Abraham Cowley photo
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti photo
Dmitri Shostakovich photo
Subhash Kak photo

“The dance of the peacock attracts not only the peahen but also the human.”

Subhash Kak (1947) Indian computer scientist

The Loom of Time (2016)

Thomas Carlyle photo
Jerzy Vetulani photo

“Dolphins, unlike us, do not have manual skills, but their dances, jumps, are perhaps the equivalent of our ballet. Sounds, like music in the Orthodox Church – without musical instruments – are probably their songs, by which they are holding long discourses. It is a semantically organized signal system.”

Jerzy Vetulani (1936–2017) Polish scientist

Vetulani, Jerzy (6 December 2009): W każdym z nas tkwi mr Hyde https://nto.pl/profesor-jerzy-vetulani-w-kazdym-z-nas-tkwi-mr-hyde/ar/4135849, interview. Nowa Trybuna Opolska (in Polish).

Gary Snyder photo

“As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the upper Paleolithic: the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.”

Gary Snyder (1930) American poet

"Statement for the Paterson Society" (1961), as quoted in David Kherdian, Six Poets of the San Francisco Renaissance: Portraits and Checklists (1967), p. 52. Snyder repeated the first part of this quote (up to "… common work of the tribe.") in the introduction to the revised edition of Gary Snyder, Myths & Texts (1978), p. viii.

Gloria Estefan photo
Ernesto Sábato photo

“A man who wants to find out who he really is should try watching the woman he loves as she dances the tango with a maestro.”

Ernesto Sábato (1911–2011) Argentine writer, painter and physicist

Ernesto Sábato in: Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time, (2007)

J. Doyne Farmer photo
Ali Abdullah Saleh photo

“Ruling Yemen is hard. I always say it’s like dancing on the heads of snakes”

Ali Abdullah Saleh (1947–2017) President of North Yemen from 1978 to 1990; President of Yemen from 1990 to 2011

The Man Who Danced on the Heads of Snakes Dec 2017) https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/07/opinion/sunday/yemen-saleh-death-legacy.html

Balasaraswati photo
Stevie Nicks photo
Ilana Mercer photo

“Dance, in general, has become more atavistic than artistic.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Hollywood: The No-Good, The Bad And The Beastly" http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2014/03/hollywood-no-good-bad-and-beastly.html Economic Policy Journal, March 7, 2014.
2010s, 2014

John Updike photo
Femi Taylor photo
Anaïs Nin photo