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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 way. Sometimes it is not pleasant. Sometimes it is fearful. But nevertheless it is inevitable.

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
Dance
Permitting
Use
Fearful
Sometimes
Nevertheless
Way
Dancer
Life
Pleasant
Inevitable
Intense
Spent

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It's what I always wanted to do, to show the laughter, the fun, the joy of dance.
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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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I don't try to tell the dancers exactly what a dance means before they do it.
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Some of you are doomed to be artists.
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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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Great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion.
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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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Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.
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What people in the world think of you is really none of your business.
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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.
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In a dancer, there is a reverence for such forgotten things as the miracle of the small beautiful bones and their delicate strength.
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I did not choose to be a dancer. I was chosen.
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The body says what words cannot.
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You don't pick dance. Dance picks you.
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Misery is a communicable disease.
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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.
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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.
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Fire is the test of gold adversity, of strong men.
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Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul's weather to all who can read it.
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We look at the dance to impart the sensation of living in an affirmation of life, to energize the spectator into keener awareness of the vigor, the mystery, the humor, the variety, and the wonder of life. This is the function of the American dance.
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