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Quotes by Dancer

"It's one of the things that looks good written down, but the reality is that you think about the pieces you're doing and try to bear in mind everyone in the audience."

"That piece has been choreographed so badly so many times. I'm loathe to do it but I may eventually because it is one of the seminal art works of the twentieth century."

"I was privileged to be able to study a year with Martha Graham, the last year she was teaching."

"With any project there's one or two things that you really want to do and that's going to crack it."

"Dance is for everybody. I believe that the dance came from the people and that it should always be delivered back to the people."

"One of our problems is our sense of discipline - dancers have an extraordinary sense of self-discipline."

"Life forms illogical patterns. It is haphazard and full of beauties which I try to catch as they fly by, for who knows whether any of them will ever return?"

"Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract, and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences."

"Usually that's going into biology in a certain way. There's certain strengths and weaknesses to both of the sexes. And I'm not against employing those nor am I against denying those, what I am looking for is a very large array of options."

"Racism tears down your insides so that no matter what you achieve, you're not quite up to snuff."

"I often say that in making dances I can make a world where I think things are done morally, done democratically, done honestly."

"It's ungrateful to be wishing you were doing something else at the moment you are living. You haven't lived in the moment that you are really living, you are wishing you were somewhere else."

"And I just thought, this is what I want to be. And I knew that dancing would be my chosen profession."

"I didn't care too much for ballet, because you had to be more disciplined, and you sort of looked like everyone else. It required a certain kind of conformity that I didn't feel like I wanted to do."

"I think that anyone who's pushed to do the very best that they can is privileged. It's a luxury."

"Sometimes I have given my husband a manuscript to read that has turned out to have fantastic rave reviews and he'll tell me it is no good. Well, if I didn't know him as well as I know him I would be terribly depressed."

"Don't think you are going to go on forever because you are not and begin to plan something that will compensate as you reduce your capacities to leap or turn on this or that or the other, begin thinking of something else."

"The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter."

"People know that they're going to see something which is entertaining but challenging as well because of the form it's in. It's dance theatre and it requires you to use your imagination - it's not straight forward."

"I have the wherewithal to challenge myself for my entire life. That's a great gift."

"Dance has never been a particularly easy life, and everybody knows that."

"I really think that aside from admiring my talent you really admire me as a person and as a woman."

"It seems to me monstrous that anyone should believe that the jazz rhythm expresses America. Jazz rhythm expresses the primitive savage."

"The formal education that I received made little sense to me."

"The dancer's body is simply the luminous manifestation of the soul."

"The reason I'm travelling so much is because of reasons that weren't completely planned. Several of the shows became successful and were invited to go to other places and they've all happened at similar times."

"We should realize in a vivid and revolutionary sense that we are not in our bodies but our bodies are in us."

"I don't think politicians should be allowed into power who are not familiar with their bodies, because that's where our bottom line is. And I know that they would make totally different decisions if they felt responsible simply for their own bodies."

"I certainly feel my career was a great career because it inspired so many many people, literally hundreds of people to follow a new kind of life and to realize that they could make out and advance their own professional and private and social lives."
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