Dance is a song of the body. Either of joy or pain.
MARTHA GRAHAMCensorship is the height of vanity.
More Martha Graham Quotes
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What people in the world think of you is really none of your business.
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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.
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My childhood years were a balance of dark and light.
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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.
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The spine is the tree of life. Respect it.
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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.
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Nobody cares if you can’t dance well. Just get up and dance. Great dancers are great because of their passion.
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The world I’m interested in is the one where things are not named.
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It’s what I always wanted to do, to show the laughter, the fun, the joy of dance.
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Some of you are doomed to be artists.
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You don’t pick dance. Dance picks you.
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The gesture is the thing truly expressive of the individual – as we think so will we act.
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Freedom to a dancer means discipline. That is what technique is for — liberation.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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There is a force, a quickness that is translated through you into action. If you block it, the world will not have it.
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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.
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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.
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It’s not my job to look beautiful. It’s my job to look interesting.
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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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Modern dance isn’t anything except one thing in my mind: the freedom of women in America.
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I believe one thing: that today is yesterday and tomorrow is today and you can’t stop.
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No animal ever has an ugly body until it is domesticated. It is the same with the human body.
MARTHA GRAHAM