"My education was rather spotty because my parents were very careless. They always forgot when it was fall and time for little girls to go to school, but then when they remembered they sent us. For years I was in ballet schools. I never went with the idea of becoming a professional. At a certain point I couldn’t really go to a regular school because I didn’t know anything, and ballet school was the only school my parents could keep me in. I was perfectly happy in a ballet class on a barre. I think that it’s the only way to bring up a girl, you see, because it gives her a feeling, a rhythm. Through dancing you interpret the music, and you feel the wonderful, natural things of the earth. It’s the discipline, doing everything absolutely perfectly, meeting the standards because, by God, with a ballet master like Fokine, if you didn’t you were in trouble.."
– Diana Vreeland, from 'Particular Passions: Talks With Women Who Shaped Our Times', by Lynn Gilbert.
