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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.

Martha Graham

The center of the stage is where I am.
MARTHA GRAHAM

Artist Attention Myself Place Stage
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.
MARTHA GRAHAM

Body Life Respect Sacred Treat Yourself
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

Age Dance Live Magic Performance Reason
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

Affirmation Aware Dance Function Live Mystery Wonderful
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

Bone Dance Day Hard People Start Work Yourself
It’s not my job to look beautiful. It’s my job to look interesting.
MARTHA GRAHAM

Beautiful Interest Job Myself
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

Cultivate Feeling Right Storm Technique Yourself
Dancing is a very living art. It is essentially of the moment, although a very old art. A dancer’s art is lived while he is dancing. Nothing is left of his art except the pictures and the memories–when his dancing days are over.
MARTHA GRAHAM

Art Dance Essential Exception Live Memories Movement Photograph
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

Believe Discipline God Principle Technique Thinking Word
What I do must be done in the sunlight of awareness.
MARTHA GRAHAM

Aware Light Myself Sun
Age’ is the acceptance of a term of years. But maturity is the glory of years.
MARTHA GRAHAM

Acceptance Age Glory Maturity Time
I want to make people feel intensely alive. I’d rather have them against me than indifferent.
MARTHA GRAHAM

Alive Feeling Intense Myself People
What people in the world think of you is really none of your business.
MARTHA GRAHAM

Business People Thinking World Yourself
You will only get out of a dance class what you bring to it. Learn by practice.
MARTHA GRAHAM

Class Dance Learning Practice Yourself
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.
MARTHA GRAHAM

Alive Artist Divine Satisfaction Strange Time
The secret to dancing is that it is about everything except dancing.
MARTHA GRAHAM

Dance Exception Freedom Secret
I have spent all my life with dance and being a dancer. It’s permitting life to use you in a very intense way. Sometimes it is not pleasant. Sometimes it is fearful. But nevertheless it is inevitable.
MARTHA GRAHAM

Dance Evitable Fear Happiness Intense Life
I feel that the essence of dance is the expression of man–the landscape of his soul. I hope that every dance I do reveals something of myself or some wonderful thing a human can be.
MARTHA GRAHAM

Dance Essence Expression Feeling Hope Human Myself Soul Wonderful
Dancers are the messengers of the gods.
MARTHA GRAHAM

Dance God Message
The world I’m interested in is the one where things are not named.
MARTHA GRAHAM

Interest Name Oneself World
My dancing is not an attempt to interpret life in the literary sense. It is an affirmation of life through movement.
MARTHA GRAHAM

Dance Life Literature Movement
Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.
MARTHA GRAHAM

Desire Invitation Perfection Practice
The unique must be fulfilled.
MARTHA GRAHAM

Fulfillment One Liner Unique
Discipline is liberation.
MARTHA GRAHAM

Discipline Liberty One Liberty
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.
MARTHA GRAHAM

Art Hope Myself Thinking Threat
Censorship is the height of vanity.
MARTHA GRAHAM

Censor One Liner
All that is important is this one moment in movement. Make the moment important, vital, and worth living. Do not let it slip away unnoticed and unused.
MARTHA GRAHAM

Important Live Moments Notice Time Worth

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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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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