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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

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Martha Graham
Age: 96 †
Born: 1894
Born: May 11
Died: 1991
Died: April 1
Artist
Ballet Dancer
Ballet Master
Choreographer
Costume Designer
Dancer
Music Pedagogue
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Martha Grehem
Behinds
Settle
Anything
Listen
Settling
Body
Behind
Dancer
Must
Terrible
Necessity
Movement
Driving
Passion
Dance
Lies
Lying
Pay
Homage
Less

More quotes by Martha Graham

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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.
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I want to make people feel intensely alive. I'd rather have them against me than indifferent.
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Dancers are the messengers of the gods.
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The center of the stage is where I am.
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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 so great that the body cries, even in its sleep. There are times of complete frustration, there are daily small deaths.
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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.
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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.
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I never thought of myself as being a genius. I don't know what genius is. I think a far better expression is a retriever, a lovely strong golden retriever that brings things back from the past, or retrieves things from our common blood memory
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In the end, it all comes down to the art of breathing.
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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.
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Nobody cares if you can't dance well.
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Sometimes it's blood memory... not the blood your mother and father gave you... but that which stretches back two or three thousand years.
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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.
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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
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You don't pick dance. Dance picks you.
Martha Graham
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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.
Martha Graham
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Some of you are doomed to be artists.
Martha Graham
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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, if it is there to begin with...I want all of my students and all of my dancers to be aware of the poignancy of life at that moment. I would like to feel that I had, in some way, given them the gift of themselves.
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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
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I believe that we learn by practice.
Martha Graham