Life & Mortality Quote by Agnes de Mille

De Mille treats certainty like a sedative: soothing, socially rewarded, quietly lethal. As a dancer and choreographer, she knew a body in motion survives by negotiating risk - balance is never a fixed state, it is a continual correction. So when she frames living as "not being sure", she is defending instability as the price of aliveness, not a defect to be engineered away. The line is bracing because it refuses the modern fantasy that the good life is a solved system: career ladder mapped, relationships optimized, identity made tidy.

"The moment you know how" lands with a double edge. On one level it's craft: once movement becomes rote, you stop listening to the music, your partner, your own limitations; the performance may continue, but the attention that makes it art has slipped. On another, it's culture. De Mille lived through a century obsessed with expertise and managerial control, where institutions promise predictability and self-help culture sells scripts for living. Her warning is that scripts turn experience into rehearsal.

"You begin to die a little" isn't melodrama; it's a diagnosis of habituation. Knowing "how" can mean you stop asking questions, stop risking embarrassment, stop being permeable to surprise. De Mille isn't romanticizing chaos. She's arguing for the productive uncertainty that keeps a person adaptive, curious, and awake - the kind of not-knowing that forces you to meet the next moment honestly, rather than forcing the next moment to match your plan.