Twyla Tharp Quotes

Literature is the memory of humanity.

Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.

Dance is in my background.

A society that forgets about art risks loslng its soul.

Culture, which makes talent shine, is not completely ours either, nor can we place it solely at our disposal. Rather, it belongs mainly to our country, which gave it to us, and to humanity, from which we receive it as a birthright.

Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past.

Dance is one of the most revealing art forms.

I say it is indispensable to look ahead of and behind oneself in the present. If there is such a thing as tradition, and I believe there is, it can only exist in the sense of the most profound movements of culture.

Tradition does not mean that the living are dead, it means that the dead are living.

Poetry is the elder sister of history, the mother of language, the ancestress of civilization.

A lot of people may not read the history of their own country, but they carry on memories transmitted by previous generations. They're trying to achieve something, [they] have their mission and anger -- all this is fed by past experience of history.

The greatest guarantee for the preservation of a person’s identity is language and faith, and all Armenians must carry these two values.

Art is the permanence of a civilization.

A deep meaning resides in old customs.

Stories are one of the means by which a culture preserves its identity.

History matters.

We want every generation to know a little something about TLC.

The dance is the mother of all languages.

Death steals everything except our stories.

At our most primitive we are storytellers and dancers.

But a man is not forgotten, as long as there are two people left under the sky. One, to tell the story; the other, to hear it.

Just as a tree without roots is dead, a people without history or cultural roots also becomes a dead people.

The world of dance is a natural world from which civilization has divorced many of us by making it appear remote - something reserved for the few who have a special talent.

Remember Old Nan's stories, Bran. Remember the way she told them, the sound of her voice. So long as you do that, part of her will always be alive in you.

One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly.