“I fell in love with the young assistant professor who took me through my first poetry course. Really in love--that is, enough to alarm Mother. Although naturally I never breathed my feelings to a soul--although naturally the first time she suggested that I might invite him home for tea I went to my room and shook for forty minutes. So she may have noticed something. In any case, in order to patrol the situation, she enrolled in his courses. And, as we bore the same name, she was seated beside me where not the flickering of an eyelash escaped her attention. I never have heard of this happening to anyone else in the history of education.”

“Above all, there was Almah. Everything combined to make her most dear to me. My life has been such that I never before had seen anyone whome I loved; and here Almah was the one congenial and sympathetic, and I loved her dearly, even before I understood what my feelings were. One day I learned all, and found that she was more precious to me than all the world.”

“Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.”

“The truest expression of a people is in its dance and in its music. Bodies never lie.”

“Ours is an upbeat, a hurried, hasty beat. It keeps pressing us to go farther, to include everything so that we can savor everything, so that we can know everything, so that we will miss nothing. Partly it's greed, but mainly its curiosity. We just want to experience it. And we do.”

“Dance in the body you have.”

“Many other women have kicked higher, balanced longer, or turned faster. These are poor substitutes for passion.”