"I want to make people feel intensely alive. I'd rather have them against me than indifferent."
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Quote collection
Martha Graham quotes (page 6 of 7)
126 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I have heard stories that it was love at first sight for both of us, that we disappeared to a guest room at Merle's house, had our meals sent up, and didn't emerge for several days. This is absolutely untrue. I would never behave like that as a guest in someone's home. Carlos and I went to my beach house."
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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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"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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"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."
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"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."
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"I think comedy is the most difficult thing in the world, I really do."
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"Some of you are doomed to be artists."
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"Discipline is liberation."
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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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"Dance is the landscape of man's soul."
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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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"I believe that we learn by practice."
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"What I do must be done in the sunlight of awareness."
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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 accumulated more bones than you started with."
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"My childhood years were a balance of dark and light."
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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 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."
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"If I can't dance, I don't care if my dances are ever done again!"
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"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."
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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 is even more difficult to verbalize them for critical discussion. The particular essence of a performance, its human sweep of articulate rhythm in space and in time has no specific terminology to describe it by."
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