Martha Graham Dancing Quotations

Dancers are the messengers of the gods.

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

At the time I started in ballet they were dancing 'The Spirit of Champagne' on pointe, in Paris. I thought, 'I don't want to dance the spirit of champagne, I want to drink it!

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

Dancing is just discovery, discovery, discovery

All that is important is this one moment in movement. Make the moment important, vital, and worth living. Do not let it slip away unnoticed and unused.

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

It takes ten years, usually, to make a dancer. It takes ten years of handling the instrument, handling the material with which you are dealing, for you to know it completely.

Nothing is more revealing than movement.

We look at the dance to impart the sensation of living in an affirmation of life, to energize the spectator into keener awareness of the vigor, the mystery, the humor, the variety, and the wonder of life. This is the function of the American dance.

The secret to dancing is that it is about everything except dancing.