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 GRAHAMThe center of the stage is where I am.
More Martha Graham Quotes
-
-
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 -
We learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. One becomes in some area an athlete of God.
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 -
Censorship is the height of vanity.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
The main thing, of course, always, is the fact that there is only one of you in the world, just one, and if that is not fulfilled then something has been lost. Ambition is not enough; necessity is everything.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
Freedom to a dancer means discipline. That is what technique is for — liberation.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
Some men have thousands of reasons why they cannot do what they want to, when all they need is one reason why they can.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.
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 -
No animal ever has an ugly body until it is domesticated. It is the same with the human body.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
There is a force, a quickness that is translated through you into action. If you block it, the world will not have it.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
The unique must be fulfilled.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
Discipline is liberation.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
Nothing is more revealing than movement.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
Art is eternal for it reveals the inner landscape which is the soul of man.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
Repetition not for monotony but the ecstasy it induces.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
What people in the world think of you is really none of your business.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
I want to make people feel intensely alive. I’d rather have them against me than indifferent.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
I get up, I fall down, all the while I am dancing.
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.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
Dance is communication, and so the great challenge is to speak clearly, beautifully and with inevitability.
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 did not choose to be a dancer. I was chosen.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
Misery is a communicable disease.
MARTHA GRAHAM