Alvin Ailey Quotes

“My lasting impression of Truman Capote is that he was a terribly gentle, terribly sensitive, and terribly sad man.”

“All my life I've been fascinated by the precipice in all of us. When you come to it, you either choose to fall or you don’t --Alvin Ailey”

“There was still no likelihood that we could make a living from dance. We were doing it because we loved it... We realized how full we felt”

“Alvin smiled back, and kissed her. "People talk about fools counting chickens before they hatch. That's nothing. We name them.”

“In religious belief as elsewhere, we must take our chances, recognizing that we could be wrong, dreadfully wrong. There are no guarantees; the religious life is a venture; foolish and debilitating error is a permanent possibility. (If we can be wrong, however, we can also be right.)”

“One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we'll need a new definition.”

“Man has a limited biological capacity for change. When this capacity is overwhelmed, the capacity is in future shock.”

“Nobody knows the future with certainty. We can, however, identify ongoing patterns of change.”

“Future shock is the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.”

“Change is not merely necessary to life - it is life.”