"Through dancing many maidens have been unmaidened, whereby I may say it is the storehouse and nursery of bastardy." ~John Northbrooke
Isn't that just lovely? :-)
I also like: "Dancing is wonderful training for girls, it's the first way you learn to guess what a man is going to do before he does it." ~Christopher Morley, Kitty Foyle
Oh, and this is the Yeats quote...
"O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- Yeats
I’m obliquely reminded of one of my favorite quotes about dancing:
“If there be but one vicious mind in the set, ’twill spread like a contagion–the action of their pulse beats to the lascivious movement of the jig–their quivering, warm-breathed sighs impregnate the very air–the atmosphere becomes electrical to love, and each amorous spark darts through every link of the chain!”
–Sheridan, The Rivals, II.1
The Rivals has so very many great lines, not to mention words!
Of course, I grew up in a church where dancing was considered a sin for the very reason Northbrooke mentions here. Perhaps all those years of ballet training, after all, were only adolescent rebellion on my part.
The Yeats quote reminds me of the Roethke poem I Knew a Woman.
Also- “The dance is a poem of which each movement is a word.” ~Mata Hari
Just came across my other favorite quote about dancing:
“Dear me, dancing is peculiar when you really think about it. If a man held your hand and put his arm round your waist without its being dancing, it would be most important; in dancing, you don’t even notice it–well, only a little bit.”
–from I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith, p. 127 of my edition