When you're in a rut, you have to question everything except your ability to get out of it.
Interpretation
In difficult times, trust in your capacity to overcome challenges while questioning other aspects of your situation.
This quote by Twyla Tharp emphasizes the importance of self-belief during challenging periods when one feels stuck or in a 'rut'. It suggests that while it's essential to critically assess one's circumstances and options, the one thing you should not doubt is your own ability to rise above the difficulties and find a way forward.
In practice
In a motivational speech about resilience and personal growth.
Do I watch dancers as people? Yes, absolutely. Do I watch really good dancers for specifically who they are? Absolutely, because how they move best and how they look best is going to be most familiar to them, and not necessarily to me.
I am still pushing the edge of what my body can do.
No one is born with skill. It is developed through exercise, through repetition, through a blend of learning and reflection that's both painstaking and rewarding. And it takes time.
Without passion, all the skill in the world won't lift you above craft. Without skill, all the passion in the world will leave you eager but floundering. Combining the two is the essence of the creative life.
I grew up in a drive-in theater, from the time I was 8, working in a snack bar watching four features every week. It was silent theater in the sense that this was a drive-in, which meant that I often saw the films going with no sound. But I learned to tell stories through action.
Without passion, all the skill in the world won't lift you above craft.
I always thought that record would stand until it was broken.
There will be many times in your lives--- at school, and more particularly when you are a grown up---when people will distract or divert you from what needs to be done. You may even welcome the distraction. But if you use it as an excuse for not doing what you suppose to do, you can blame no one but yourself. If you truly wish to accomplish something, you should allow nothing to stop you, and chances are you'll succeed.
Nothing ever built arose to touch the skies unless some man dreamed that it should, some man believed that it could, and some man willed that it must.
If God gives you something you can do, why in God's name wouldn't you do it?
Every writing teacher I ever had except for one told me I was an awful writer, had no idea what I was doing, and should stop immediately. It only took the one to tell me something different to light a fire under me.
Whatever course you have chosen for yourself, it will not be a chore but an adventure if you bring to it a sense of the glory of striving.
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