Katherine Dunham Quotes

When I'm writing a new play, there's a period where I know I shouldn't be out in public much. I imagine most people who create go through something like this. You willfully loosen some of the inner straps that hold your core together.

The music has to drive you. That's just it. You follow it. You follow the songs.

Having done so many versions, I never felt like an artist in 'Swan Lake.'

There are a lot of things I do that I don't want to, but I have to. It's truly an emotional need for me to perform.

The ballet world, it's a crazy world.

Yeah, I blew up. But people don't see the other side of it. They don't talk about how I played on a broken foot. They don't know about the everyday grind.

When you're wearing pointe shoes, honestly, they hurt - a lot - every day.

It was my whole life; I spent all my time dancing, and I loved it very much.

I selected an enormous Marine Corps emblem to be tattooed across my chest. It required several sittings and hurt me like the devil, but the finished product was worth the pain. I blazed triumphantly forth, a Marine from throat to waist. The emblem is still with me. Nothing on earth but skinning will remove it.

I will take it all: tongs, molten lead, prongs, garrotes, all that burns, all that tears, I want to truly suffer. Better one hundred bites, better the whip, vitriol, than this suffering in the head, this ghost of suffering which grazes and caresses and never hurts enough.

You don't do pictures because the audience is ready for them. You do them because there's something gnawing at you, something inside.

I could never hurt him enough to make his betrayal stop hurting. And it hurts, in every part of my body.

Are you in pain, Frodo?' said Gandalf quietly as he rode by Frodo's side. 'Well, yes I am,' said Frodo. 'It is my shoulder. The wound aches, and the memory of darkness is heavy on me. It was a year ago today.' 'Alas! there are some wounds that cannot be wholly cured,' said Gandalf. 'I fear it may be so with mine,' said Frodo. 'There is no real going back. Though I may come to the Shire, it will not seem the same; for I shall not be the same. I am wounded with knife, sting, and tooth, and a long burden. Where shall I find rest?' Gandalf did not answer.

Dancing is a part of my life where when I don't dance I feel like there's something missing because I'm such a physical person who loves to express myself through dance, but I love to act. I love to sing. I love to entertain so if I'm passionate about a certain project, I wanna do it.

One writes a poem when one is so taken up by an emotional concept that one is unable to remain silent.

Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman.

If somebody asks, "What is a dance?" how can you define it? But you can dance and you can know the inner feel of it.

Frustration is one of the great things in art. Satisfaction is nothing.

I have never been able to carry out any work coolly. On the contrary it is done, so to speak, with my own blood. Anyone who looks at my works must be able to sense that.

It is essential that the revelation we receive, the conception of an image which embraces a certain thing, which has no sense in itself, which has no subject, which means 'absolutely nothing' from the logical point of view.. ..should speak so strongly in us, evoke such agony or joy, that we feel compelled to paint.

Ballet dancers are a self-chosen elite. To survive and surmount years of disciplinary preparation and seasons of even more arduous performance requires rigid determination and almost mindless self-abnegation. One other factor is difficult to predetermine: without a certain admixture of hysteria - sometimes masking as self-obsession, sometimes even counterfeiting incipient madness - performers, at once acrobats, artists, and animals, make little public impression.

You dance love, and you dance joy, and you dance dreams.

Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.

We were moderate, we will never know what it is to spill out our lives.

Comedians are the nearest to suicide.