The body says what words cannot.
Martha GrahamRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Mastery in the arts requires a significant investment of time and practice.
Martha Graham emphasizes that the journey to becoming a skilled dancer is a lengthy process, typically taking around ten years. This period is essential for artists to fully understand and master their tools and the medium they work with, highlighting the importance of dedication and perseverance in the arts.
Themes
DanceMasteryPracticeCommitmentArtistry
In practice
Example use cases
During a motivational speech about the arts at a school assembly.
More from Martha Graham
All quotes →Nobody cares if you can't dance well.
Martha GrahamRead
Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul's weather to all who can read it.
Martha GrahamRead
What people in the world think of you is really none of your business.
Martha GrahamRead
No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a strange, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.
Martha GrahamRead
The body is your instrument in dance, but your art is outside that creature, the body.
Martha GrahamRead
Similar quotes
Because here’s the thing: No matter how much one tells stories of magical beasts or impossible worlds, in the end, it is always the world of here and now one is writing about. The better one understands that world, the more powerful the stories will be.
Steven BrustRead
I'm a musician and, just as the critics are hard on me, I'm hard on the critics.
Oscar PetersonRead
The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story. Sometimes we try to protect them from getting booboos that are too big. Don’t. This is your protagonist, not your kid.
Janet FitchRead
Writing is a deep-sea dive. You need hours just to get into it: down, down, down. If you're called back to the surface every couple of minutes by an email, you can't ever get back down. I have a great friend who became a Twitterer and he says he hasn't written anything for a year.
Dave EggersRead
We are the music-makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams, Wandering by lone sea-breakers, And sitting by desolate streams. World-losers and world-forsakers, Upon whom the pale moon gleams; Yet we are the movers and shakers, Of the world forever, it seems.
Arthur O'ShaughnessyRead
I love the entire ritual of getting dressed. When we do a fashion show, we try to send out a message; we couldn't do that without the hair and makeup. The whole is equal to the sum of its parts.
Marc JacobsRead