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 GRAHAMCensorship is the height of vanity.
More Martha Graham Quotes
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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.
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 -
What makes a great dancer is not technique. What makes a great dancer is passion.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
In a dancer, there is a reverence for such forgotten things as the miracle of the small beautiful bones and their delicate strength.
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Some of you are doomed to be artists.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
I did not choose to be a dancer. I was chosen.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
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 -
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 -
Think of the magic of that foot, comparatively small, upon which your whole weight rests. It’s a miracle, and the dance is a celebration of that miracle.
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 -
Our arms start from the back because they were once wings.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
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 -
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 -
Modern dance isn’t anything except one thing in my mind: the freedom of women in America.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
It’s what I always wanted to do, to show the laughter, the fun, the joy of dance.
MARTHA GRAHAM