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Authors & Writing
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The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.
-Isadora Duncan
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Children
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So long as little children are allowed to suffer, there is no true love in this world.
-Isadora Duncan
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The finest inheritance you can give to a child is to allow it to make its own way, completely on its own feet.
-Isadora Duncan
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Dance, Dancing
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The only dance masters I could have were Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Walt Whitman and Nietzsche.
-Isadora Duncan
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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.
-Isadora Duncan
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Before I was born my mother was in great agony of spirit and in a tragic situation. She could take no food except iced oysters and champagne. If people ask me when I began to dance, I reply, In my mother's womb, probably as a result of the oysters and champagne - the food of Aphrodite.
-Isadora Duncan
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The dancer's body is simply the luminous manifestation of the soul.
-Isadora Duncan
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Experience
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What one has not experienced, one will never understand in print.
-Isadora Duncan, My Life
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Jazz
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It seems to me monstrous that anyone should believe that the jazz rhythm expresses America. Jazz rhythm expresses the primitive savage.
-Isadora Duncan
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Law
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We may not all break the Ten Commandments, but we are certainly all capable of it. Within us lurks the breaker of all laws, ready to spring out at the first real opportunity.
-Isadora Duncan
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Life
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People do not live nowadays. They get about 10% out of life.
-Isadora Duncan
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Love
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Art is not necessary at all. All that is necessary to make this world a better place to live in is to love --to love as Christ loved, as Buddha loved.
-Isadora Duncan
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Madness
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Perhaps he was a bit different from other people, but what really sympathetic person is not a little mad?
-Isadora Duncan
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Marriage
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So that ends my first experience of matrimony, which I always thought a highly over-rated performance.
-Isadora Duncan
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Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences.
-Isadora Duncan
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Theater
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I had learned to have a perfect nausea for the theatre: the continual repetition of the same words and the same gestures, night after night, and the caprices, the way of looking at life, and the entire rigmarole disgusted me.
-Isadora Duncan, My Life, ch. 5, 1927
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Virtue
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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.
-Isadora Duncan
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Books by and about Isadora Duncan