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 GRAHAMWe are all of us, unique – each a unique pattern of creativity and if we do not fulfill it, it is lost for all time.
More Martha Graham Quotes
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We learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. One becomes in some area an athlete of God.
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People have asked me why I chose to be a dancer. I did not choose. I was chosen to be a dancer, and with that, you live all your life.
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Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.
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Repetition not for monotony but the ecstasy it induces.
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If you feel depressed you shouldn’t go out on the street because it will show on your face and you’ll give it to others. Misery is a communicable disease.
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My dancing is not an attempt to interpret life in the literary sense. It is an affirmation of life through movement.
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The world I’m interested in is the one where things are not named.
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What I do must be done in the sunlight of awareness.
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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.
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The spine is the tree of life. Respect it.
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Modern dance isn’t anything except one thing in my mind: the freedom of women in America.
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No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a strange, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.
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Some of you are doomed to be artists.
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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.
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There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.
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My childhood years were a balance of dark and light.
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Dancers today can do anything; the technique is phenomenal. The passion and the meaning to their movement can be another thing.
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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.
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In the end, it all comes down to the art of breathing.
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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.
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Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.
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The body is your instrument in dance, but your art is outside that creature, the body.
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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.
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Great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion.
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Censorship is the height of vanity.
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Dance is the landscape of man’s soul.
MARTHA GRAHAM