Dance Quotes

Let that day be lost to us on which we did not dance once!--Friedrich Nietzsche

To dance at all is to confront oneself. It is the art of honesty. . .It is impossible to dance out of the side of your mouth. You tell the truth when you dance. If you lie, you hurt yourself. --Shirley Maclaine

Dance first. Think later. It's the natural order. ~Samuel Beckett

Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen? ~Friedrich Nietzsche

It is of course possible to dance a prayer. ~Glade Byron Addams

I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal. ~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Stifling an urge to dance is bad for your health - it rusts your spirit and your hips. ~Adabella Radici

I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance. ~Friedrich Nietzsche

Through dancing many maidens have been unmaidened, whereby I may say it is the storehouse and nursery of bastardy. ~John Northbrooke
And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music. ~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing. ~William James

Dancing is just discovery, discovery, discovery. ~Martha Graham

There are short-cuts to happiness, and dancing is one of them. ~Vicki Baum

On Joy and Sorrow

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
                                                                                   --Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, 1923

With much wisdom comes much suffering;
the more knowledge, the more grief.
                               --Ecclesiastes 1:18

People's Reactions

Written on 04/06/2004, after signing a contract to teach for two years at the American International School of Gaza. (The building was reduced to rubble in January 2009, during Israel's offense/attack/demolition of the Gaza Strip.)

There’s nothing more priceless than people’s reactions:

“Does your mother know you’re going?”

“Are you f--- out of your mind?”

"Have you seen Not Without My Daughter?" ask's my dad's cousin.

“You’re going to give this family a heart attack,” says my aunt.

“You’re so selfish,” chimes in my sister.

The blank stares.

The clueless, "Oh that’s cool," because they don’t know what Gaza is. After a “in Israel…Palestine” then maybe it kind of registers, maybe.

“Anywhere but there,” says my dad. “Go to Cairo, go to Amman, go to Damascas, but don’t go there.” This is the same dad who dropped me off in a barrio of Caracas and refused to come in with me once he saw the place. I was upset and disappointed; he was going to get to meet church-goers I had been spending so much time with. When I got home that night, I asked him why he didn’t come in with me.

“Are you crazy? I would have come out and there wouldn’t have been a car there. And then if I called the police, they would have said it was my fault for having left it there.”

Years later, I related this to a friend—“So he leaves his daughter there, but he won’t leave his car there.”

So then I relay that to my dad.

His reply: “Mi hija es inteligente; ella se puede defender. El carro es bruto; no se puede defender.”

But Gaza completely freaks him out. He says of course they’ll be my best friends, 99% of them. "It’s just that 1% you have to be wary of."

“Well, isn’t it like that anywhere?”

“No. Anywhere else it’s like 1/10,000 but in Gaza it’s 1/100.”

But then they’re the people who know me, who really think it’s the coolest thing ever. Yes, their face registers concern, but they know this is right for me. Because they know me. I thought Texas would be awful, but surprisingly enough, when I went to my old high school yesterday, my former teachers and parents of my friends sincerely looked positive and happy for me.

Texas is so full of surprises.

Mechanical slavery instead of human slavery

"The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends."

--Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1895)

Even if machines can do factory work, or even clean the house or cook dinner, will they ever be able to take care of children, the elderly, the sick, and the disabled?

"They (corporations) cannot commit treason, nor be outlawed nor excommunicated, for they have no souls."

--Sir Edward Coke (1552-1634), Case of Sutton's Hospital

But they should be. An international body has to regulate international corporations.

The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kingcaid

"My teacher was a woman who had been trained by Methodist missionaries; she was of the African people, that I could see, and she found in this a source of humiliation and self-loathing, and she wore despair like an article of clothing, like a mantle, or a staff on which she leaned constantly, a birthright which she would pass on to us" (16).

"This education I was receiving had never offered me the satisfaction I was told it would; it only filled me with question that were not answered, it only filled me with anger.  I could not like what it would lead to: a humiliation so permanent that it would replace your own skin. And your own name, whatever it might be, eventually was not the gateway to who you really were, and you could not ever say to yourself, "My name is Xuela Claudette Desvarieux." This was my mother's name, but I cannot say it was her real name, for in a life like hers, as in mine, what is a real name?

My own name is her name, Xuela Claudette, and in the place of the Desvarieux is Richardson, which is my father's name; but who are these people Claudette, Desvarieux, and Richardson? To look into it, to look at it, could only fill you with despair; the humiliation could only make you intoxicated with self-hatred. For the name of any one person is at once her history recapitulated and abbreviated, and on declaring it, that person holds herself high or low, and the person hearing it holds the declarer high or low."

Sign in Harlem

Top 5 Music Albums

1. Strangeways, Here we Come by The Smiths
2. Here Comes the Sun by Nina Simone
3. Motown Gospel: In Loving Memory
4. 18 Greatest by Mahalia Jackson
5. God's Property by Kirk Franklin's Nu Nation