Martha Graham Quotes

Flapping my arms I began to cluck, look at me, I'm the disco duck.

My dancing is not an attempt to interpret life in the literary sense. It is an affirmation of life through movement.

Let this be the criterion always: anything that makes you festive, anything that gives you celebration, anything that makes you dance and sing to such an extent that you disappear in your dancing, in your singing, in your celebration... is the only true religion I know of.

For hardly any man dances when sober, unless he is insane. Nor does he dance while alone, nor at a respectable and moderate party. Dancing is the final phase of a wild party with fancy decorations and a multitude of delights.

the chicken's still dancing the chicken won't stop

Wherever a dancer stands is holy ground.

Dancing is why I love music as much as I do and vice-versa, and there aren’t many things better than those two combined.

When I am asked about influences, I always say I bow down to Fred Astaire, because when you look at him dancing you never look at his extremities, do you? You look at his centre. What you never see is the hours of work that went into the routines, you just see the breathtaking spirit and freedom.

I have danced with the spider. I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god.

In fact, entertainment has taken the place of celebration in the present world. But entertainment is quite different from celebration; entertainment and celebration are never the same. In celebration you are a participant; in entertainment you are only a spectator. In entertainment you watch others playing for you. So while celebration is active, entertainment is passive. In celebration you dance, while in entertainment you watch someone dancing, for which you pay him.

When I discovered dancing, I learned to dream.

Dancing is like bank robbery, it takes split-second timing.

I was very happy that I was as normal as possible before I went into serious dance.

Dance is your pulse, your heartbeat, your breathing. It's the rhythym of your life.

Pole dancing really isn't as easy as it looks.

Where wildness and disorder are visible in the dance, there Satan, death and all kinds of mischief are likewise upon the floor. For this reason I could wish that the dance of death were painted on the walls of all ball-rooms in order to warn the dancers, not by the levity of their deportment, to provoke the God of righteousness to visit them with a sudden judgment.

Without dance, a man can do nothing.

Hot and hasty, like a Scotch jig.

If I can not dance, I shall die!

We have no adequate conception of the perfection of the ancient tragic dance. The pleasure which the greeks received from it had for its basis difference; & the more unfit the vehicle, the more lively was the curiosity & intense the delights at seeing the difficulty overcome.

The only dance masters I could have were Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Walt Whitman and Nietzsche.

Dance is communication, and so the great challenge is to speak clearly, beautifully and with inevitability.

The dance, like most dances after supper, was a merry one; some of the older folks joined in it, and the squire himself figured down several couple with a partner, with whom he affirmed he had danced at every Christmas for nearly half a century.

Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance

There are shortcuts to happiness, and dancing is one of them.