Time & Perspective Quote by Ann Miller

Ann Miller frames her stardom as a kind of secular vow, and the choice of "high priestess" is doing heavy lifting. It conjures glamour, yes, but also ritual, discipline, and separation from ordinary life. A priestess is revered and watched; she belongs to the temple more than to herself. Miller isn’t asking for pity so much as insisting on the price tag behind the sequins: the body as instrument, the schedule as doctrine, the public image as a job that never clocks out.

The loneliness she names is structural, not just emotional. In the studio-and-stage economy that made dancers like her, excellence wasn’t a talent you "had", it was a standard you maintained under constant scrutiny. Dance is one of the few arts where the raw material ages in public. So "no time for play" reads less like puritanism and more like self-defense: play risks softness, injury, distraction, the tiny slippages that a camera or chorus line will punish.

Her aside - "that means hard" - carries a faint impatience, like she’s correcting a cultural misunderstanding. Audiences romanticize musical-era performers as effortless bundles of charm; Miller yanks the curtain back to show labor, repetition, and isolation. There’s also a gendered edge: women in show business were expected to be available, pleasant, socially sparkling. By declaring herself unplayful, she claims authority over her time and body, turning what could be read as coldness into professionalism. The quote isn’t just about sacrifice; it’s about control in an industry built to take it.