181 Quotes by Martha Graham

It takes about ten years to make a mature dancer. The training is twofold. There is the study and practice of the craft in order to strengthen the muscular structure of the body. The body is shaped, disciplined, honored, and in time, trusted. The movement become clean, precise, eloquent, truthful. Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul's weather to all who can read it. This might be called the law of the dancer's life, the law which governs its outer aspects

How many leaps did Nijinksy take before he made the one that startled the world? He took thousands and thousands and it is that legend that gives us the courage, the energy, and arrogance to go back into the studio knowing that while there is so little time to be born to the instant, you will work again among the many that you may once more be born as one. That is a dancer's world.

I get up, I fall down, all the while I am dancing.

I believe that we learn by practice.

When you start with an idea, or something hits you, then you have to follow that through to the end, and it's the following through to the end that makes the pattern. That, for me, is choreography.

I believe that we learn by practice... it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which come shape of achievement, a sense of one's being, a satisfaction of spirit.

Some of you are doomed to be artists.

Nobody cares if you can't dance well.

One can always lament, you know — but to laugh in the face of life, that's very hard. And for me the great tragedian should also be a great comedian.