I want to make people feel intensely alive. I’d rather have them against me than indifferent.
MARTHA GRAHAMThe reason dance has held such an ageless magic for the world is that it has been the symbol of the performance of living.
More Martha Graham Quotes
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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.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
It’s not my job to look beautiful. It’s my job to look interesting.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
Censorship is the height of vanity.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
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 -
I did not choose to be a dancer. I was chosen.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
Modern dance isn’t anything except one thing in my mind: the freedom of women in America.
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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 -
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.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
Fire is the test of gold; adversity, of strong men.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
What makes a great dancer is not technique. What makes a great dancer is passion.
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 -
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 -
I am absorbed in the magic of movement and light. Movement never lies. It is the magic of what I call the outer space of the imagination.
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 -
My dancing is not an attempt to interpret life in the literary sense. It is an affirmation of life through movement.
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 -
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 -
Great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
Dance is communication, and so the great challenge is to speak clearly, beautifully and with inevitability.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
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.
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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.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
What I do must be done in the sunlight of awareness.
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 -
The secret to dancing is that it is about everything except dancing.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
The spine is the tree of life. Respect it.
MARTHA GRAHAM