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Quote by Donna Goddard

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Dance: A Spiritual Affair

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Donna Goddard

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“Generally, touching wasn’t something that she was a big fan of. She didn’t need it herself, and found that it was not necessarily helpful to other people, although most crave it. She touched little children, a lot, because they genuinely need it to grow and thrive. She touched lovers because lovers are like children. Well, not exactly. But, all going well, lovers do have the openness, vulnerability, and playfulness of children with each other and so touching is both good and helpful. She touched people in dancing because dancers can only talk through their bodies. They have no other language.”

“My body is all that exists. It is the only thing I can depend on. Music or no music, there is a rhythm that cancels out all the other noise, all the nonsense that keeps screaming for attention, all the pain of the world outside. I point and leap and spin, and sweat whips off me, showering the duct-taped boards under my bare, calloused feet. I see myself in the fractured shards of mirror I glue-gunned to the wall. This is how I know myself--in this tattered leotard; in these ripped tights; in this broken, salvaged room. This is the only place I’m real. This is the place I come when I need to remember who I am. This is where I come when I need to forget everything else.”

“Dancing is a relief, but it can’t be everything. I am starting to realize this. I can close my eyes and will myself to stop thinking for three, maybe five minutes at a time. I can dance my way out of my head and into my body, where things briefly make sense, but which I always have to leave eventually. Relief never lasts forever. The world is always there, waiting for me with its relentless weirdness. I must always eventually come back. I must stand still. And it is in that stillness that the other parts of me return, the parts of me that intersect with and bump against the rest of the world. The parts that remember and feel.”