Dancers From The United States

"Raising three kids isn't easy. The older they get, the more they become their own individuals with unique needs, hobbies and social lives, My twins are God-sent. Parenting constantly teaches you about yourself. It takes a lot of prayer and patience. I love it. It's grounding and fulfilling."

"They come to my office after school, and they are in the studio with me. They are in dance rehearsals. It's natural that they would learn my choreography."

"I'm not bossy. I'm the boss."

"One of my most satisfying moments as a mom is when I found Blue one day soaking in the bath with her eyes closed, using blends I created and taking time for herself to decompress and be at peace."

"I have made an extreme effort to stay true to my boundaries and protect myself and my family. No amount of money is worth my peace."

"“Rumi, who’s on the album, our youngest daughter, she was watching [at home], and I forgot to thank her so I get to thank her now. Thank you, Rumi.”"

"I try to only tour when my kids are out of school. I always dreamt of a life where I could see the world with my family and expose them to different languages, architecture and lifestyles."

"“I just wanna encourage people to do what they’re passionate about and to stay persistent.”"

"Whenever I’m ready to get a six-pack, I will go into beast zone and work my a– off until I have it, But right now, my little FUPA and I feel like we are meant to be."

"I’ve been through hell and back, and I’m grateful for every scar, I look at the woman I was in my 20s and I see a young lady growing into confidence but intent on pleasing everyone around her. I now feel so much more beautiful, so much sexier, so much more interesting. And so much more powerful."

"I’ve spent so many years trying to better myself and improve whatever I’ve done that I’m at a point where I no longer need to compete with myself. I have no interest in searching backwards. The past is the past. I feel many aspects of that younger, less evolved Beyoncé could never f*** with the woman I am today. Haaa!"

"After the birth of my first child, I believed in the things society said about how my body should look."

"During my recovery, I gave myself self-love and self-care, and I embraced being curvier. I accepted what my body wanted to be, To this day my arms, shoulders, breasts, and thighs are fuller. I have a little mommy pouch, and I’m in no rush to get rid of it. I think it’s real."

"In the past, I spent too much time on diets, with the misconception that self-care meant exercising and being overly conscious of my body. My health, the way I feel when I wake up in the morning, my peace of mind, the number of times I smile, what I’m feeding my mind and my body—those are the things that I’ve been focusing on. Mental health is self-care too."

"“When I look out there, I see myself.”"

"“I’d like to thank my beautiful husband, my beautiful three children who are at home watching.”"

"“Thank you so much. I’m trying not to be too emotional, and I’m trying to just receive this night.”"

"Anyone who perceives my message as anti-police is completely mistaken. I have so much admiration and respect for officers and the families of officers who sacrifice themselves to keep us safe. But let's be clear: I am against police brutality and injustice. Those are two separate things."

"“I want to show that you can have fun and have purpose, be respectful and speak your mind. You can be both elegant and a provocateur. You can be curvy and still be a fashion icon. I wish this freedom for every person. I have paid my dues and followed every rule for decades, so now I can break the rules that need to be broken. My wish for the future is to continue to do everything everyone thinks I can’t do."

"We are at the precipice of an incredible shift, the brink of history. I’m not here as a celebrity. I’m not here as a politician. I’m here as a mother. A mother who cares deeply about the world my children and all of our children live in. A world where we have the freedom to control our bodies. A world where we’re not divided. Our past, our present, our future, merge to meet us here."

"It’s time to sing a new song. A song that began 248 years ago. The old notes of downfall, discord, despair, no longer resonate. Our generations of loved ones before us are whispering a prophecy, a quest, a calling, an anthem. Our moment right now. It’s time for America to sing a new song. Our voices sing a chorus of unity. They sing a song of dignity and opportunity. Are y’all ready to add your voice to the new American song? Because I am. So let’s do this!"

"Robert Staples sees in Ntozake Shange's play For Colored Girls "a collective appetite for black male blood." Yet it is my female children and my Black sisters who lie bleeding all around me, victims of the appetites of our brothers."

"I went to a concert where Ntozake Shange was reading. There, everything exploded for me. She was speaking a language that I knew-in the deepest parts of me-existed, and that I had ignored in my own feminist studies and even in my own writing. What Ntozake caught in me is the realization that in my development as a poet, I have, in many ways, denied the voice of my brown mother-the brown in me. I have acclimated to the sound of a white language which, as my father represents it, does not speak to the emotions in my poems-emotions which stem from the love of my mother. The reading was agitating. Made me uncomfortable. Threw me into a week-long terror of how deeply I was affected. I felt that I had to start all over again. That I turned only to the perceptions of white middle-class women to speak for me and all women. I am shocked by my own ignorance."

"There is a line in Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enough. In the play, the woman in purple speaks after having struggled to deal with all the psychic and physical aspects of herself that the culture ignores or demeans. She sums herself up in these wise and peaceful words: “here is what i have . . ./poems/big thighs/lil tits/&/so much love”. This is the power of the body, our power, the power of the wildish woman."

"it doesn’t matter where I live. Just give me a room to write in."

"We realized we were on our own and started bonding together, Latina women writers like Cherrie Moraga, Jewelle Gomez, black writers like Audre Lorde and Ntozake Shange, who wrote For Colored Women, we understood we had to support each other or nobody would."

"I used to have boundaries up all the time, which is limiting. I never want to feel limited. If anything is life changing, being the descendant of a slave is. I went into therapy 10 years ago because I needed to work that out. I’ve gotten better. Everything about me is more fluid, much less rigid. I’m gonna do everything I can, feel everything I can, until it hurts. Then I’ll stop. All they did was buy us–it’s not an honor, it’s just something that happened. Our gifts belong to us."

"Hopefully, these characters bring us closer to a sense of self: honest and honored. Icons: Toussaint L'Ouverture to José Martí to lesser known heroes, Atahualpa and Denmark Vesey. We lace our visions with Celia Cruz and Aretha Franklin."

"I have spent my life undoing language until it works for me. We must not only repossess the language, we must deslaveryize it."

"I write for young girls of color, for girls who don’t even exist yet, so that there is something there for them when they arrive. I can only change how they live, not how they think. I want to say, “Here, look where you can live, look what you can think.” I concentrate on giving this to young people because they are the treasurers of black culture."

"We must not let our oppression deny us the earth."

"…I think unless black women are writing the pieces, we're being left out the same way we used to be left out of literature. We don't appear in things unless we write them ourselves. In the white male literary establishment women attain what looks like positions of power or influence or economic stability, but they're structured in such a way that they become unthreatening."

"I think I always see a young child or an adolescent of color, but not necessarily right this minute. I started writing because there's an absence of things I was familiar with or that I dreamed about. One of my senses of anger is related to this vacancy—a yearning I had as a teenager. I hate that word. But as an adolescent—to have done something that I didn't have and I didn't know what it was 'cause I had never heard about it…"

"…gender is cultural: we have menarche to deal with, virginity, menopause, pregnancy, childbirth; these things are unavoidable. And in some places they've been wise enough to have ritual and ceremony about significant events. It is unfortunate in our culture-meaning north American mainstream culture—that all this has been minimized to the point where little girls are even afraid to say that they are starting to menstruate when they should be very happy. Grown women are afraid to say that they are approaching the menopause, when that means that they have lived a whole successful life. They've lived so long that they can have this…"

"No. I’m not trying to go away from anybody. I don’t go where my feelings get hurt. If you’re going to be nice to me, I’ll come."

"Multiculturalism is a white people joke. Black people have always been here as different. People need to stop saying that there is one way to be–and then the issue will disappear. I don’t tell Navajos they can’t speak Navajo. I don’t tell Asians they can’t eat noodles. Because black people have refused to eat potatoes and cabbage, white people are terrified. Now that we’re saying “I’m talkin’ Zulu, I’m changin’ my name, my child’s goin’ to a black school with Muslims,” white people get upset and have to call it something. Multiculturalism isn’t about culture, it’s about power."

"i found god in myself & i loved her/i loved her fiercely"

"…The characters in Sassafras did say awful things and trash one another, but there are people who do. In the time of the Sassafras narrative certain women's collectives existed that were very dramatic and people had a lot of lovers. We didn't even call it promiscuity. It was very different from the environment today. People today sit down and think about how they really want to be monogamous. It was not anybody's goal fifteen years ago."

"When I was growing up there were few Asians on TV and now I'm one of many and that makes me happy. I see how far we've come, which is amazing. But diversity is still an issue and we have to continue to grow the message."

"We saw that amazing documentary 'Forks Over Knives' and that cleared everything up for us. Every Sunday we're going to the farmers market now, getting our fresh fruits and veggies. It's just two weeks, but we feel much better. I love animals. I don't want to eat them."

"Cage took it to work in his way of making compositions then; and he used the idea of 64—the number of the hexagrams —to say that you had 64, for example, sounds; then you could cast, by chance, to find which sound first appeared, cast again, to say which sound came second, cast again, so that it's done by, in that sense, chance operations. Instead of finding out what you think should follow—say a particular sound—what did the I Ching suggest? Well, I took this also for dance."

"I was working on a title called, “Untitled Solo,” and I had made—using the chance operations—a series of movements written on scraps of paper for the legs and the arms, the head, all different. And it was done not to the music but with the music of Christian Wolff."

"John Cage and I became interested in the use of chance in the 50's. I think one of the very primary things that happened then was the publication of the "I Ching," the Chinese book of changes, from which you can cast your fortune: the hexagrams."

"If a dancer dances - which is not the same as having theories about dancing or wishing to dance or trying to dance or remembering in his body someone else's dance - but if the dancer dances, everything is there.. ..our ecstasy in dance comes from the possible gift of freedom, the exhilarating moment that this exposing of the bare energy can give us. What is meant is not license, but freedom...(1952)"

"Merce [Cunningham] is my favorit artist in any field. Sometimes I’m pleased by the complexity of a work I paint. By the fourth day I realize it’s simple. Nothing Merce does [choreography for dance] is simple. Everything has a fascinating richness and multiplicity of direction. [Jasper Johns did a lot of décors for Merce Cunningham, as Robert Rauschenberg did and Frank Stella..."

"I met him [Merce Cunningham] around 1953 after a performance I saw. He was teaching and making dances for his company and was already working with John Cage. What interested me initially wasn’t just the movement but also the music he worked with, which was unfamiliar to me.. ..Later [[Robert Rauschenberg|Bob Rauschenberg] had been doing sets and costumes for the Cunningham Company.. .I can’t say exactly how, but for a period of time, Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg, and I saw each other frequently and exchanged ideas. John [Cage] was very interested in presenting his ideas to other people, so it was impossible to be around and not to learn.."

"It hurts to have to remember those times, but at a certain stage forgiveness takes over. Forgiving means not to hold on. You let it go, because it only hurts you. Not forgiving, you suffer, 'cause you think about it over and over again. And for what? I had an abusive life, there's no other way to tell the story, it's a reality, it's a truth. That's what you've got. So you have to accept it."

"Spirituality isn’t tied to any one religion or philosophy. It isn’t the property of a priesthood or clergy. Spirituality is a personal awakening and relationship with our Mother Earth and the universe that increases openness and positivity. My awakening began five decades ago through my practice and study of Buddhist teachings. Sharing the story of this most precious part of my life with you is a long-cherished dream. This book carries my personal guidance on how to create lasting happiness. It explains spiritual truths I’ve learned on my unlikely path to joy, from childhood to today."

"Each of us is born, I believe, with a unique mission, a purpose in life that only we can fulfill. We are linked by a shared responsibility: to help our human family grow kinder and happier. I first learned about the workings of the universe from my daily experiences growing up in Nutbush, Tennessee, a small rural town. I loved spending time outside, running through the fields, looking up at the heavenly bodies in the sky, spending time with animals—domestic and wild ones—and listening to the sounds of nature. Even as a little girl, I sensed an unseen universal force as I walked through the wide-open pastures each day. Communing with nature taught me to trust my intuition, which always seemed to know the way home when I was lost, the best branch on a tree for swinging, or where a treacherous rock was hidden in a stream. I learned to listen to my heart, which taught me that you and I are connected to each other and everything else on this planet. We are joined together by the mysterious nature of life itself, the fundamental creative energy of the universe. In this complicated world of ours, where contradictions abound, we find breathtaking beauty in the most unlikely places. The brightest rainbows appear after the heaviest of storm clouds. Magnificent butterflies emerge from the drabbest cocoons. And the most beautiful lotus flowers bloom from the deepest and thickest mud. Why do you suppose life works this way? Perhaps those rainbows, butterflies, and lotus flowers are meant to remind us that our world is a mystical work of art—a universal canvas upon which we all paint our stories, day by day, through the brushstrokes of our thoughts, words, and deeds."

"Even on the saddest days, one thing helps: treasuring happy memories and looking forward."