No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time; it is just that others are behind the times.
MARTHA GRAHAMI use the words gods and goddesses principally, I think, to mean beautiful bodies – bodies that are absolute instruments. And I believe in discipline, I believe in a very definite technique.
More Martha Graham Quotes
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We look at the dance to impart the sensation of living in an affirmation of life, to energize the spectator into keener awareness of the vigor, the mystery, the humor, the variety, and the wonder of life. This is the function of the American dance.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
I’d rather an audience like me than dislike me, but I’d rather they disliked me than be apathetic, because that is the kiss of death.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
The next time you look into the mirror, just look at the way the ears rest next to the head; look at the way the hairline grows; think of all the little bones in your wrist. It is a miracle. And the dance is a celebration of that miracle.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
The world I’m interested in is the one where things are not named.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
I did not choose to be a dancer. I was chosen.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
The reason dance has held such an ageless magic for the world is that it has been the symbol of the performance of living.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
Dancers have more bones than most people and on the days when you work hard you are sure that you have somehow accumulated more bones than you started with.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
I believe one thing: that today is yesterday and tomorrow is today and you can’t stop.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
Every dance is a kind of fever chart, a graph of the heart.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
I use the words gods and goddesses principally, I think, to mean beautiful bodies – bodies that are absolute instruments. And I believe in discipline, I believe in a very definite technique.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
When you start with an idea, or something hits you, then you have to follow that through to the end, and it’s the following through to the end that makes the pattern. That, for me, is choreography.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
No animal ever has an ugly body until it is domesticated. It is the same with the human body.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
A dancer must listen to his body and pay homage to it. Behind the movement lies this terrible, driving passion, this necessity. I won’t settle for anything less.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
You have no right to go before a public without an adequate technique, just because you feel. Anything feels – a leaf feels, a storm feels – what right have you to do that? You have to have speech, and it’s a cultivated speech.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
In a dancer, there is a reverence for such forgotten things as the miracle of the small beautiful bones and their delicate strength.
MARTHA GRAHAM






