You give all your life to doing this one thing. It sounds grim, it sounds frightening - it isn't - it has a great gaiety at times and a great wonder.

Modern dance isn't anything except one thing in my mind: the freedom of women in America.

Every dance is a kind of fever chart, a graph of the heart.

Discipline is liberation.

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

A dancer, more than any other human being, dies two deaths: the first, the physical when the powerfully trained body will no longer respond as you would wish. After all, I choreographed for myself. I never choreographed what I could not do. I changed steps in Medea and other ballets to accommodate the change. But I knew. And it haunted me. I only wanted to dance.

Wherever a dancer stands is holy ground.