Dancer's Life Quotes

I didn't worry too much about staying in shape once I'd stopped dancing. You get to the point where you just burn out and have to give your body a chance to heal.

Dancers, you know, they have pain everywhere: ankles in the morning, or back or neck or ribs or knees or the muscles. You are never free of pain, you know.

A friend of my mother's, Irene Lopez, was a Spanish dancer. She saw me bopping around the room and said to my mother, 'Rosita might have talent. Can I take her to my dance teacher?' There was no thought of a career at that time, but I knew I loved the attention, and that's so much a part of being a performer.

The set of 'You Got Served' was like a dancer's dream.

For me, as an actress, being a dancer has helped me. I've done it with my feet bloody.

Dancers have more bones than most people and on the days when you work hard you are sure that you have somehow accumulated more bones than you started with.

I liked to read but, being a dancer, I didn't have a lot of time to read.

A lot of professional dancers become professional when they turn 15 or 16 years old, when they're still children. So you've trained every single waking moment up until that point for a career that could maybe only last 10 years, maybe longer if your body holds up, if your injuries are kept at bay.

As a dancer running around the world, I always questioned whether that's what I wanted to do.

I think it's useful to experience other types of dance and other cultures, and the life of a classical dancer these days is certainly not all tutus! So experience of other dance forms is a good idea.

The life of a dancer is tragically short. What is remarkable about the New York City Ballet is that it makes us forget that. Because it keeps the ballet alive.

Certainly the life of a dancer is very difficult. The training is very hard and relentlessly grueling.

Every dancer has injuries, and your injury could happen that season that you were getting that one part that you've wanted to do your whole career. So you have to appreciate every single moment until it happens.

How difficult it is to exist, that we are athlete and artist. We have injuries. People don't see the hard side of being a ballerina. They just see this beautiful and effortless thing, and they assume it's easy and cute. I hate when people say it's cute!

A dancer's life is hard - it is so physically demanding, and at any moment, you could have an injury that could end your career.

Trying to be a professional dancer, paying my rent by posing nude for art classes, staring at people staring at me naked. Daring them to think of me as anything but a form they were trying to capture with their pencils and charcoal. I was defiant. Hell-bent on surviving. On making it. But it was hard and it was lonely, and I had to dare myself every day to keep going.

Sometimes I miss being en pointe, but not a whole lot. Every once and a while, I would love to float for a minute on a shoe. But for the most part, I did it long enough that it's OK.

A dancer's career is short - you just keep going until your legs pack up.

I would have young dancers come to me and ask me questions and want to know what my experiences were like: 'What's it like being a black dancer?' So I just felt like it was necessary for me to share my experiences with them.

I repeat the wake-up, the workout, the quick shower, the breakfast of three hard-boiled egg whites and a cup of coffee, the hour to make my morning calls and deal with correspondence, the two hours of stretching and working out ideas by myself in the studio ... That's my day, every day. A dancer's life is all about repetition.

A dancer's life is as peripatetic and unstable as that of an actor's. You're freelancing yourself all the time, and a dancer's lifespan is even shorter than an actor's: once they turn 30 or 35, they have to stop.

My dream is to continue dancing forever. I would kill myself if I didn’t dance.