No flower of art ever fully blossomed save it was nourished by tears of agony.
No composer has yet caught this rhythm of America – it is too mighty for the ears of most.
What I am interested in doing is finding and expressing a new form of life.
All my lovers have been geniuses; it’s the one thing that I insist.
One might say that the American trend of education is to reduce the senses almost to nil.
Will and energy sometimes prove greater than either genius or talent or temperament.
I hope that schools have changed since I was a little girl. My memory of the teaching of the public schools is that it showed the brutal incomprehension of children.
I have only danced my life. As a child I danced the spontaneous joy of growing things. As an adolescent, I danced with joy turning to apprehension of the first realisation of tragic undercurrents; apprehension of the pitiless brutality and crushing progress of life.
The real American type can never be a ballet dancer. The legs are too long, the body too supple and the spirit too free for this school of affected grace and toe walking.
So that ends my first experience of matrimony, which I always thought a highly over-rated performance.
For I was never able to understand, then or later on, why, if one wanted to do a thing, one should not do it. For I have never waited to do as I wished. This has frequently brought me to disaster and calamity, but at least I have the satisfaction of getting my own way.
It seems to me monstrous that anyone should believe that the jazz rhythm expresses America. Jazz rhythm expresses the primitive savage.
People don’t live nowadays: they get about ten percent out of life.
The only dance masters I could have were Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Walt Whitman and Nietzsche.
Any woman or man who would write the truth of their lives would write a great work. But no one has dared to write the truth of their lives.
The dancer will not belong to any nation but to all humanity.
Farewell my friends, I go to glory.
I had discovered that love might be a pastime as well as a tragedy, and I gave myself to it with pagan innocence.
Virtuous people are simply those who have not been tempted sufficiently, because they live in a vegetative state, or because their purposes are so concentrated in one direction that they have not had the leisure to glance around them.
The whole world is absolutely brought up on lies. We are fed nothing but lies. It begins with lies and half our lives we live with lies.