Misty Copeland is a ballet dancer for American Ballet Theatre. Last year she became the first African American woman to be promoted to principal dancer at a major American ballet company. She knows something about the perpetual pursuit:
The full quote, from an interview in Bloomberg Businessweek magazine, 4 August 2016:
“There’s no taking days off. We’re as good as our last performance, and you’re constantly working to be better every day. So there’s not a lot of time to kind of sit back and lose that fire. Once you lose it, it’s kind of over and you retire, because the audience sees it, if you’re not keeping up with your training and your technique. So I think that either the day my body can’t handle it anymore or the day I lose the passion and fire for it, I’ll stop.”
