Quotes from Martha Graham

Dancers have more bones than most people and on the days when you work hard you are sure that you have somehow accumulated more bones than you started with.

In the end, it all comes down to the art of breathing.

Theater is a verb before it is a noun, an act before it is a place.

Sometimes it's blood memory... not the blood your mother and father gave you... but that which stretches back two or three thousand years.

I did not want to be a tree, a flower or a wave. In a dancer's body, we as audience must see ourselves, not the imitated behavior of everyday actions, not the phenomenon of nature, not exotic creatures from another planet, but something of a miracle.

Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul's weather to all who can read it.

The body is a sacred garment.

To me, a building - if it's beautiful - is the love of one man, he's made it out of his love for space, materials, things like that.

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there id only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.

We learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. One becomes in some area an athlete of God.

Nothing is more revealing than movement. The body says what words cannot.

No artist is pleased.... there is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction; a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.