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Dance Quotes by Martha Graham

77 Dance quotes by Martha Graham

All Dance quotes Martha Graham’s page

I was chosen to be a dancer, and the quotes say that dancing lives through you all your life. Passion, not technique, drives a great dancer, turning movement into a song of the body that shows joy or pain. It’s described as discovery, a way to let the soul out and affirm life.

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

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Dancers are the messengers of the gods.

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Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.

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Every dance is a kind of fever chart, a graph of the heart.

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You don't pick dance. Dance picks you.

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Nobody cares if you can't dance well.

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

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The secret to dancing is that it is about everything except dancing.

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What makes a great dancer is not technique. What makes a great dancer is passion.

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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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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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Freedom to a dancer means discipline. That is what technique is for -- liberation.

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

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“A dancer isn't great because of their technique...they're great because of their passion.”

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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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You will only get out of a dance class what you bring to it. Learn by practice.

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To me, this acquirement of nervous, physical, and emotional concentration is the one element possessed to the highest degree by the truly…

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We learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living,…

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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…

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I have spent all my life with dance and being a dancer. It's permitting life to use you in a very intense…

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Dancing appears glamorous, easy, delightful. But the path to paradise of the achievement is not easier than any other. There is fatigue…

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It takes ten years, usually, to make a dancer. It takes ten years of handling the instrument, handling the material with which…

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The next time you look into the mirror, just look at the way the ears rest next to the head; look at…

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Dancers have more bones than most people and on the days when you work hard you are sure that you have somehow…

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It takes about ten years to make a mature dancer. The training is twofold. There is the study and practice of the…

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I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live…

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“I am a dancer. I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or…

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There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one…

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...Although, as the Latin verb to educate, educate, indicates, it is not a question of putting something in but drawing it out,…

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A dancer, more than any other human being, dies two deaths: the first, the physical when the powerfully trained body will no…

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It is difficult to see the great dance effects as they happen, to see them accurately, catch them fast in memory. It…

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How many leaps did Nijinksy take before he made the one that startled the world? He took thousands and thousands and it…

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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…

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

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Our arms start from the back because they were once wings.

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Dance is a song of the body. Either of joy or pain.

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Dancing is just discovery, discovery, discovery

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The spine is the tree of life. Respect it.

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Dance is the hidden langauge of the soul, of the body.

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Wherever a dancer stands is holy ground.

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More by Martha Graham

The body never lies.

You have no right to go before a public without an adequate technique, just because you feel. Anything feels - a leaf feels, a…

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one…

Misery is a communicable disease.

People have asked me why I chose to be a dancer. I did not choose. I was chosen to be a dancer, and with…

All things I do are in every woman. Every woman is Medea. Every woman is Jocasta. There comes a time when a woman is…

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

The secret to dancing is that it is about everything except dancing.

What makes a great dancer is not technique. What makes a great dancer is passion.

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…

You are unique, and if that is not fulfilled, then something has been lost.

You see, when weaving a blanket, an Indian woman leaves a flaw in the weaving of that blanket to let the soul out.

Dancing is just discovery, discovery, discovery - what it all means, the way the little bone near the ankle relates itself to the floor…

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

There is a force, a quickness that is translated through you into action. If you block it, the world will not have it.