When you are on stage, you don't see faces. The lights are in your eyes and you see just this black void out in front of you. And yet you know there is life out there, and you have to get your message across.

I liked Latin, I like languages, I liked all the myths, and the Roman tales that we were required to translate in Latin, and all these interesting people who were never quite what they thought they would be or seemed to be.

There is pain and sacrifice in everyone's world. That's why, when I was dancing, I had no pain.

So dancing was not something I had a great desire to do.

When you are on stage, you don't see faces. The lights are in your eyes and you see just this black void out in front of you. And yet you know there is life out there, and you have to get your message across.

I used to love to play dress-up, where you get your mother's or your grandmother's dresses and high heels.

I could work out a lot of my emotions by going to class and dancing.

I didn't have any doubts about my choice of career, but I had constant doubts about my ability, yes.

I had two sisters, and we would love to get dressed up and pretend that we were chic, sophisticated ladies. And I think that was a great sort of preparation, in a way.

Of course, in the art class, I was the model.

And I just thought, this is what I want to be. And I knew that dancing would be my chosen profession.

I had a wonderful childhood, coming from Cincinnati, and I think that it was great going into the life that I was going to have, where you have to start young as a dancer.

As soon as I hear music, something in me starts to vibrate.

But what was my motivation was music, and the fact that I love to move around. I'm always moving around.

You don't learn from a situation where you do something well. You enjoy it and you give yourself credit, but you don't really learn from that. You learn from trial and error, trial and error, all the time.

I was very much of a tomboy.

On the other hand, I think it is wonderful for everyone to take ballet classes, at any age. It gives you a discipline, it gives you a place to go. It gives you some control in your life.

Once I started dancing, I was not the spoiled brat or the rebellious child that I was as a child.

It's ungrateful to be wishing you were doing something else at the moment you are living. You haven't lived in the moment that you are really living, you are wishing you were somewhere else.

I didn't care too much for ballet, because you had to be more disciplined, and you sort of looked like everyone else. It required a certain kind of conformity that I didn't feel like I wanted to do.

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

The particular ballet was not so important as the fact that I was physically healthy, and capable of getting out there and dancing as often as possible.

That the work involved, the willingness to take chances, the commitment, the opportunity to get on stage and make people happy, was more important than becoming famous, or even what I was dancing.

The body can do amazing things in a situation when it is really called for.

Even though I am a professional, and I know what the steps are, I don't quite know how I'm going to do them, because I haven't lived that moment yet. I always feel very insecure and I get very excited.

In fact, ballet companies did not exist in the Midwest when I was a child.

I learned to love dance for its own sake.

I loved tests because it was another form of competing, a healthy competition.

I think especially in a world where you have so little say about what goes on in your life, or in the politics of the world around you, it is wonderful to go into that studio, and tell yourself what to do.

When you get on stage, you can be anything. You are removed from reality in a way, the real world.

I liked tap, because I liked hearing the results of my movements.

I'm thought of as a cool, unemotional dancer, but inside I'm not.

In this watering-place I acted an heroic character, badly studied; and being a novice on such a stage, I forgot my part before a pair of lovely blue eyes.

I hate failure and that divorce was a Number One failure in my eyes. It was the worst period of my life. Neither Desi nor I have been the same since, physically or mentally.

Terrorism, ladies and gentlemen, in my eyes I have a very, very, very simple explanation. Gangs of criminals, killers, used unfortunately by certain governments in the past for political purposes, who are on their own now as gangs.

When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.

Love is seeing without eyes, hearing without ears; hatred is nothing.

A time will come when men will stretch out their eyes. They should see planets like our Earth.

I keep my eyes clear and I hit 'em where they ain't.

They're just big in the eyes of the American public.

My greatest challenge has been to change the mindset of people. Mindsets play strange tricks on us. We see things the way our minds have instructed our eyes to see.

For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.

Young man, if God had wanted you to see me that way, he would have put your eyes in your bellybutton.

He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.

The decision to go to war is the most important decision that I can make as a representative in Congress. As a veteran, I see any potential military action first through the eyes of the young men and women who volunteered to wear the uniform and would carry out such a mission.

If we can but tear the blindfold of self-deception from our eyes and loosen the gag of self-denial from our voices, we can restore our country to greatness.

Model. Two mobile eyes in a mobile head, itself on a mobile body.

The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.

Love is the opener as well as closer of eyes.