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 GRAHAMNo 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.
More Martha Graham Quotes
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The body says what words cannot.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
You don’t pick dance. Dance picks you.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
The body is your instrument in dance, but your art is outside that creature, the body.
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 -
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.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
Misery is a communicable disease.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
The world I’m interested in is the one where things are not named.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
Our arms start from the back because they were once wings.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
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.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
Censorship is the height of vanity.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
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.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
Modern dance isn’t anything except one thing in my mind: the freedom of women in America.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
The gesture is the thing truly expressive of the individual – as we think so will we act.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
Freedom to a dancer means discipline. That is what technique is for — liberation.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
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