I believe one thing: that today is yesterday and tomorrow is today and you can’t stop.
MARTHA GRAHAMI’d rather an audience like me than dislike me, but I’d rather they disliked me than be apathetic, because that is the kiss of death.
More Martha Graham Quotes
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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.
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 -
Age’ is the acceptance of a term of years. But maturity is the glory of years.
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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 -
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 -
It’s what I always wanted to do, to show the laughter, the fun, the joy of dance.
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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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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.
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Freedom to a dancer means discipline. That is what technique is for — liberation.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
Art is eternal for it reveals the inner landscape which is the soul of man.
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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 -
Stand up! Keep your backs straight! Remember that this is where the wings grow.
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Nothing is more revealing than movement.
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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.
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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 -
My dancing is not an attempt to interpret life in the literary sense. It is an affirmation of life through movement.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
Dancers today can do anything; the technique is phenomenal. The passion and the meaning to their movement can be another thing.
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I want to make people feel intensely alive. I’d rather have them against me than indifferent.
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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.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
In the end, it all comes down to the art of breathing.
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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 -
Discipline is liberation.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time; it is just that others are behind the times.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
Misery is a communicable disease.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
Repetition not for monotony but the ecstasy it induces.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul’s weather to all who can read it.
MARTHA GRAHAM