Martha Graham Quotes

I get up, I fall down, all the while I am dancing.

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.

In a dancer, there is a reverence for such forgotten things as the miracle of the small beautiful bones and their delicate strength.

Nothing is more revealing than movement.

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.

Fire is the test of gold; adversity, of strong men.

Dancers today can do anything; the technique is phenomenal. The passion and the meaning to their movement can be another thing.

At the time I started in ballet they were dancing 'The Spirit of Champagne' on pointe, in Paris. I thought, 'I don't want to dance the spirit of champagne, I want to drink it!

To me, a building - if it's beautiful - is the love of one man, he's made it out of his love for space, materials, things like that.

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.

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.

It's not my job to look beautiful. It's my job to look interesting.

You can be Eastern or Burmese or what have you, but the function of the body and the awareness of the body results in dance and you become a dancer, not just a human being.

The body is your instrument in dance, but your art is outside that creature, the body.

Art is eternal for it reveals the inner landscape which is the soul of man.

Repetition not for monotony but the ecstasy it induces.

It's what I always wanted to do, to show the laughter, the fun, the joy of dance.

No animal ever has an ugly body until it is domesticated. It is the same with the human body.

The gesture is the thing truly expressive of the individual - as we think so will we act.

The unique must be fulfilled.

The center of the stage is where I am.

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.

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.

It takes ten years, usually, to make a dancer. It takes ten years of handling the instrument, handling the material with which you are dealing, for you to know it completely.

The body is shaped, disciplined, honored, and in time, trusted.

First we have to believe, and then we believe.

There is fatigue so great that the body cries, even in its sleep.

The world I'm interested in is the one where things are not named.

I believe one thing: that today is yesterday and tomorrow is today and you can't stop.

Some of you are doomed to be artists.

I want to make people feel intensely alive. I'd rather have them against me than indifferent.

All things I do are in every woman. Every woman is Medea. Every woman is Jocasta. There comes a time when a woman is a mother to her husband. Clytemnestra is every woman when she kills.

Sometimes it's blood memory... not the blood your mother and father gave you... but that which stretches back two or three thousand years.

Every dance is a kind of fever chart, a graph of the heart. The instrument through which the dance speaks is also the instrument through which life is lived ... the human body.

I think comedy is the most difficult thing in the world, I really do.

Discipline is liberation.

What I do must be done in the sunlight of awareness.

Dance is the landscape of man's soul.

I believe that we learn by practice.

I don't try to tell the dancers exactly what a dance means before they do it.

You don't pick dance. Dance picks you.

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.

I'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.

My childhood years were a balance of dark and light.

One can always lament, you know — but to laugh in the face of life, that's very hard. And for me the great tragedian should also be a great comedian.

Theater used to be a verb; it used to be an act. But nowadays it is just a noun. It is a place.

If I can't dance, I don't care if my dances are ever done again!

Pity is a corroding thing.

You give all your life to doing this one thing. It sounds grim, it sounds frightening - it isn't - it has a great gaiety at times and a great wonder.

There is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost.