Top 100 Quotes About Martha Graham
#1. The first year I was in New York, I met Martha Graham. She said, 'Well, Mr. Wilson, what do you want to do in life?' I was 21 years old, and I said, 'I have no idea.' And she said, 'If you work long enough and hard enough, you'll find something.'
Robert Wilson
#2. I think of my parents as a single unit, and it's interesting because they shared so much, and they were totally opposite. My mother, a Martha Graham dancer, had a classical background; my father had a back-porch background.
Arlo Guthrie
#3. She leaned down and smelled the skin at Connor's shoulders right at the spots where, as Martha Graham might have said, his own wings might have been attached.
Rebecca Wells
#4. When I was 12 years old, someone took me to see Martha Graham. It was nothing like what I thought of as serious dancing and even then I knew I was having a great experience. It was as if somebody was moving through space like no one ever did before.
Leslie Fiedler
#5. I was privileged to be able to study a year with Martha Graham, the last year she was teaching.
Twyla Tharp
#6. One of the things that helps me tell a story through music is to create a character. I have to have a muse, whether it's Frida Kahlo, Martha Graham, Marlene Dietrich, or Pippi Longstocking.
Madonna Ciccone
#7. There's no point pretending that all of Martha Graham's pieces are equally strong.
Robert Gottlieb
#9. I learned to act by watching Martha Graham dance, and I learned to dance by watching Charlie Chaplin act.
Louise Brooks
#10. I've always danced and exercised. I can't imagine not doing it. I'll be Martha Graham in my 90s doing contractions on the floor.
Madonna Ciccone
#11. Sometimes it's blood memory ... not the blood your mother and father gave you ... but that which stretches back two or three thousand years.
Martha Graham
#13. A dancer isn't great because of their technique ... they're great because of their passion.
Martha Graham
#15. We are all of us, unique - each a unique pattern of creativity and if we do not fulfill it, it is lost for all time.
Martha Graham
#16. Repetition not for monotony but the ecstasy it induces.
Martha Graham
#17. My childhood years were a balance of dark and light.
Martha Graham
#18. America does not concern itself now with Impressionism. We own no involved philosophy. The psyche of the land is to be found in its movement. It is to be felt as a dramatic force of energy and vitality. We move; we do not stand still. We have not yet arrived at the stock-taking stage.
Martha Graham
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. Dance is a song of the body. Either of joy or pain.
Martha Graham
#24. 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.
Martha Graham
#25. Dancing is just discovery, discovery, discovery
Martha Graham
#26. Don't stand when you can sit; don't sit when you can lie down.
Martha Graham
#27. It's not my job to look beautiful. It's my job to look interesting.
Martha Graham
#28. The body is your instrument in dance, but your art is outside that creature, the body.
Martha Graham
#29. 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.
Martha Graham
#30. 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!
Martha Graham
#31. I love Martha's Vineyard, where I have had a house for thirty years. I have loved visiting countries around the world. But I always come home to Washington.
Katharine Graham
#32. My dancing is not an attempt to interpret life in the literary sense. It is an affirmation of life through movement.
Martha Graham
#33. 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.
Martha Graham
#34. No artist is ahead of his time. He is the time. It is just that others are behind the time.
Martha Graham
#35. I did not choose to be a dancer. I was chosen.
Martha Graham
#37. The world I'm interested in is the one where things are not named.
Martha Graham
#38. No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time; it is just that others are behind the times.
Martha Graham
#39. Dancers today can do anything; the technique is phenomenal. The passion and the meaning to their movement can be another thing.
Martha Graham
#40. To me, this acquirement of nervous, physical, and emotional concentration is the one element possessed to the highest degree by the truly great dancers of the world. Its acquirement is the result of discipline, of energy in the deep sense. That is why there are so few great dancers.
Martha Graham
#41. 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.
Martha Graham
#42. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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.
Martha Graham
#47. 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.
Martha Graham
#48. I don't think in Art there is ever a precedent; each moment is a new one & terrifying & threatening & bursting with hope.
Martha Graham
#49. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissastifaction; a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.
Martha Graham
#50. 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.
Martha Graham
#51. Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance. Great dancers are great because of their passion.
Martha Graham
#52. 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
#53. You will only get out of a dance class what you bring to it. Learn by practice.
Martha Graham
#54. 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.
Martha Graham
#55. If I can't dance, I don't care if my dances are ever done again!
Martha Graham
#56. Theater used to be a verb; it used to be an act. But nowadays it is just a noun. It is a place.
Martha Graham
#60. I want to make people feel intensely alive. I'd rather have them against me than indifferent.
Martha Graham
#61. In 1980, a well-meaning fundraiser came to see me and said, "Miss Graham, the most powerful thing you have going for you to raise money is your respectability." I wanted to spit. Respectable! Show me any artist who wants to be respectable.
Martha Graham
#62. 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
#63. 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.
Martha Graham
#64. 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
#65. Modern dance isn't anything except one thing in my mind: the freedom of women in America.
Martha Graham
#66. It's what I always wanted to do, to show the laughter, the fun, the joy of dance.
Martha Graham
#67. Stand up! Keep your backs straight! Remember that this is where the wings grow.
Martha Graham
#69. 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.
Martha Graham
#70. 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
#71. In the end, it all comes down to the art of breathing.
Martha Graham
#72. 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
#73. 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 ...
Martha Graham
#74. 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. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.
Martha Graham
#77. Great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion.
Martha Graham
#78. 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
#80. Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul's weather to all who can read it.
Martha Graham
#81. Think of the magic of the foot, comparatively small, upon which your whole weight rests. It's a miracle and the dance is a celebration of that miracle.
Martha Graham
#82. 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.
Martha Graham
#83. What makes a great dancer is not technique. What makes a great dancer is passion.
Martha Graham
#85. Every dance is a kind of fever chart, a graph of the heart.
Martha Graham
#87. 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
#88. There is a fatigue so great that the body cries, even in its sleep. There are times of complete frustration; there are daily small deaths.
Martha Graham
#89. I love words very much. I've always loved to talk, and I've always love words - the words that rest in your mouth, what words mean and how you taste them and so on. And for me the spoken word can be used almost as a gesture.
Martha Graham
#90. The gesture is the thing truly expressive of the individual - as we think so will we act.
Martha Graham
#91. 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
#93. I believe that dance was the first art. A philosopher has said that dance and architecture were the first arts. I believe that dance was first because it's gesture, it's communication. That doesn't mean it's telling a story, but it means it's communicating a feeling, a sensation to people.
Martha Graham
#95. Freedom to a dancer means discipline. That is what technique is for
liberation.
Martha Graham
#96. I'm asked so often whether I believe in life after death. I do believe in the sanctity of life, the continuity of life and of energy. I know the anonymity of death has no appeal for me. It is the now that I must face and want to face.
Martha Graham
#98. To me, the body says what words cannot. I believe that dance was the first art.
Martha Graham
#99. 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.
Martha Graham
#100. The reason dance has held such an ageless magic for the world is that it has been the symbol of the performance of living.
Martha Graham
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