There is a force, a quickness that is translated through you into action. If you block it, the world will not have it.
MARTHA GRAHAMThe main thing, of course, always, is the fact that there is only one of you in the world, just one, and if that is not fulfilled then something has been lost. Ambition is not enough; necessity is everything.
More Martha Graham Quotes
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The past is not dead; it is not even past. People live on inner time; the moment in which a decisive thought or feeling takes place can be at any time. Timeless feelings are common to all of us.
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Freedom to a dancer means discipline. That is what technique is for — liberation.
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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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Some men have thousands of reasons why they cannot do what they want to, when all they need is one reason why they can.
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Censorship is the height of vanity.
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Nothing is more revealing than movement.
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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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Art is eternal for it reveals the inner landscape which is the soul of man.
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The reason dance has held such an ageless magic for the world is that it has been the symbol of the performance of living.
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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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Stand up! Keep your backs straight! Remember that this is where the wings grow.
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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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The main thing, of course, always, is the fact that there is only one of you in the world, just one, and if that is not fulfilled then something has been lost. Ambition is not enough; necessity is everything.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
Every dance is a kind of fever chart, a graph of the heart.
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We are all of us, unique – each a unique pattern of creativity and if we do not fulfill it, it is lost for all time.
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Dance is a song of the body. Either of joy or pain.
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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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The body is a sacred garment. It’s your first and last garment; it is what you enter life in and what you depart life with, and it should be treated with honor.
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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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I don’t think in art there is ever a precedent; each moment is a new one and terrifying and threatening and bursting with hope.
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It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.
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What people in the world think of you is really none of your business.
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Our arms start from the back because they were once wings.
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Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul’s weather to all who can read it.
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I am certain that movement never lies. There is only one law of posture I have been able to discover – the perpendicular line connecting heaven and earth.
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I believe that we learn by practice… it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which come shape of achievement, a sense of one’s being, a satisfaction of spirit.
MARTHA GRAHAM