To live and to laugh require a reason. But dancing is so close to one's guts that it has no reason and yet it needs none; it's physical, and as a source of good cheer it is end endless.

Dancing may not be the perfect substitute for love, human love, but it certainly requires all the time and thought and energy that could otherwise be dedicated to love.

A brand-new pair of toe shoes presents itself to us as an enemy with a will of its own that must be tamed.

A toe shoe is as eccentric as the ballerina who wears it: their marriage is a commitment.

We live only to dance. If living were not an essential prerequisite, we would abstain.

I once heard worship defined as celebrating the availability of God.

It's volatile, the marriage. Which one isn't? Nothing better than a good, full-on row. Get it all out. Say rude and nasty things. And then be sorry. Genuinely sorry, afterwards.

That's the key to success, isn't it? It has to be fun.

Christian perfection consists in three things: praying heroically, working heroically, and suffering heroically.

No amount of thought can ever reveal what comes unexpectedly.

When somebody shows up and they believe in you, it makes all the difference.

Nor are we the culmination of evolution, except in the sense that there has never been another species so bizarrely ingenious that it could create both iambic pentameter and plutonium.

Life is so horrible that one can only bear it by avoiding it. And that can be done by living in the world of art.

It is a pitiful fortune that is not without enemies.

Only ambition is fired by the coincidences of success and easy accomplishment.