109 Quotes by Isadora Duncan

All my life I have struggled to make one authentic gesture....

Farewell my friends, I go to glory.

Before I was born my mother was in great agony of spirit and in a tragic situation. She could take no food except iced oysters and champagne. If people ask me when I began to dance, I reply 'In my mother's womb, probably as a result of the oysters and Champagne.'

There are joys so complete, so all perfect, that one should not survive them.

When I was sixteen, I danced before an audience without music. At the end someone suddenly cried 'its Death and the Maiden'. But that was not my intention; I was only endeavoring to express my first knowledge of the underlying tragedy in all seemingly joyous manifestation. The dance according with my comprehension, should have been called 'Life and the Maiden'.

It is only in romances that people undergo a sudden metamorphosis. In real life, even after the most terrible experiences, the main character remains exactly the same.

I had discovered that love might be a pastime as well as a tragedy, and I gave myself to it with pagan innocence.

It is unheard-of, uncivilized barbarism that any woman should still be forced to bear such monstrous torture. It should be remedied. It should be stopped. It is simply absurd that, with our modern science, painless childbirth does not exist as a matter of course.... I tremble with indignation when I think ofthe unspeakable egotism and blindness of men of science who permit such atrocities when they can be remedied.

All my lovers have been geniuses; it's the one thing that I insist.