Martha Graham Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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

Martha Graham
Dancing is just discovery, discovery, discovery — what it all means…

Martha Graham
No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time; it is just that others are behind the times.

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

Martha Graham
Great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion.

Martha Graham
There is a supreme lucidity, which is the precisely calculated awareness which is called madness.

Martha Graham
I don't think in Art there is ever a precedent; each moment is a new one & terrifying & threatening & bursting with hope.

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

Martha Graham
I think 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
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
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
The erotic element is life, but doesn't have to absorb you, it doesn't have to be a naughty word. It's the love of life in many ways.

Martha Graham
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 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
Looking at the past is like lolling in a rocking chair. It is so relaxing and you can rock back and forth on the porch, and never go forward.

Martha Graham
To learn to dance by practicing dancing or to live by practicing living, the principles are the same.… One becomes, in some area, an athlete of God.

Martha Graham
To practice means to perform, 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
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
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.

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

Martha Graham
I've always regarded eroticism as a beautiful word. I'm not ashamed to be linked to it. I would be ashamed to be linked to flamboyant sexuality; that's a part of life, but it isn't all of it.

Martha Graham
No artist is pleased…. No satisfaction whatever at any time…. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

Martha Graham
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
The body is a sacred garment: it is what you enter life in and what you depart life with, and it should be treated with honour, and with joy and with fear as well. But always, though, with blessing.

Martha Graham
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