Bodily Expression Quotes

My genetic autobiography can be found throughout my body.

Dance is a song of the body. Either of joy or pain.

The medium of poetry is not words, the medium of poetry is not lines-it is the motion of air inside the human body, coming out through the chest and the voice box and through the mouth to shape sounds that have meaning. It's bodily.

A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.

I'm a very physical actor. I use everything - toes, teeth, ears, everything. I don't simply mean physical in the sense of movement and vigour. I find myself remembering the shape of a scene by how I'm standing, what I'm doing.

Ballet is a riddle of means and ends.

Love is a bodily shape; and Christian works are no more than animate faith and love, as flowers are the animate springtide.

(and from my thighs which shrug and pant a murdering rain leapingly reaches the upward singular deepest flower which she carries in a gesture of her hips)

The dancer's trembling heart must bring everything into harmony, from the tips of her shoes to the flutter of her eyelashes, from the ruffles of her dress to the incessant play of her fingers.

You think of it [voicing] as something where you not only don't //need// your body, but you don't even have it to use! There's nothing you can do with your body that's going to show in the final product. Maybe that's all the more reason I used my body so much to get whatever noise or sounds out of it I could. When it was needed to keep the energy up I found myself almost running in place! It is very physical.

I want people to look like people when they're dancing.

I'm athletic but in a dancer way.

I walk like a duck: very straight up and down. Or like a penguin. It's a dead giveaway that I'm a dancer.

To me, dance is an extraordinary thing, more extraordinary than most people usually think. Dance preceded writing, speaking and music. When mute people speak their body language, it is true speaking rather than handicap, this is the first word and the first writing. Thus to me, the body is fundamental.

A gesture cannot be regarded as the expression of an individual, as his creation (because no individual is capable of creating a fully original gesture, belonging to nobody else), nor can it even be regarded as that person's instrument; on the contrary, it is gestures that use us as their instruments, as their bearers and incarnations

What is passion? It is surely the becoming of a person. Are we not, for most of our lives, marking time? Most of our being is at rest, unlived. In passion, the body and the spirit seek expression outside of self. Passion is all that is other from self. Sex is only interesting when it releases passion. The more extreme and the more expressed that passion is, the more unbearable does life seem without it. It reminds us that if passion dies or is denied, we are partly dead and that soon, come what may, we will be wholly so.

The subtle dance of the body joins us to the world.

You say 'I' and you are proud of this word. But greater than this- although you will not believe in it - is your body and its great intelligence, which does not say 'I' but performs 'I'.

You know, I find people with great honesty, bodily, physical honesty, who sit just the way they like to sit, and walk the way they like to walk, and don't come into a room all pumped up, I find them elegant.

I've always negotiated the world very physically, from football to tussling at the playground to taking my clothes off.

Words and action in movies are the spirit or the mind. And these days the body is almost completely forgotten. In the beginning the body - nature - was more part of the action.