Dance Pain Quotes & Sayings

The dance of life finds its beginnings in grief ... Here a completely new way of living is revealed. It is the way in which pain can be embraced, not out of a desire to suffer, but in the knowledge that something new will be born in the pain. — Henri Nouwen

If you want to take dance to an extra level, you have to be physically fit. You also have to put the years of work in. If there's no pain, there's no gain. You've got to sweat to improve. — Andrew Stone

The wind? I am the wind. The sea and the moon? I am the sea and the moon. Tears, pain, love, bird-flights? I am all of them. I dance what I am. Sin, prayer, flight, the light that never was on land or sea? I dance what I am. — Isadora Duncan

I could have missed the pain, but I'd have had to miss the dance. — Tony Arata

We thought we were special, opening our perceptions, honing our empathy, spilling that cauldron of shared pain onto the dance floor of language and then trying to make a minuet out of all that chaotic hurt. It doesn't matter a damn bit. We're no avatars, no sons of god or man. We're only us, scribbling our conceits alone, reading alone, and dying alone. — Dan Simmons

t is silly to think they all achieved it "just like that".
nothing in life is so easy, that is a fact.
Behind the scenes were tears and pain,
they stumbled and fell but got up again.
They heard a voice, firm and true
"Muster yourself you'll make it through"
Steadied by a hand they arose to dance
in the turmoil and storm with perseverance
At the end, it came upon them; a light so bright
success was theirs: it was their right! — Manuela George-Izunwa

He stared up at the stars: and it seemed to him then that they were dancers, stately and graceful, performing a dance almost infinite in its complexity. He imagined he could see the very faces of the stars; pale, they were, and smiling gently, as if they had spent so much time above the world, watching the scrambling and the joy and the pain of the people below them, that they could not help being amused every time another little human believed itself the center of its world, as each of us does. — Neil Gaiman

One thing I have learned hard, if indeed I have learned it now: it is a reduction of our humanity to hide from pain, our own or others'. To hide from anything. That was Marian's text. Be open, be available, be exposed, be skinless. Skinless? Dance around in your bones. — Wallace Stegner

Last dance with Mary Jane
One more time to kill the pain
I feel summer creepin' in and I'm
Tired of this town again — Tom Petty

Never had she danced so beautifully; the sharp knives cut her feet, but she did not feel it, for the pain in her heart was far greater. — Hans Christian Andersen

Most people in the Western world grow up with the received wisdom that Mozart was a genius. But few people necessarily know why. More than anyone else, he captured this something which is the human condition, the fine line that we all constantly dance between joy and pain, between absolute happiness and absolute heartbreak. — Charles Hazlewood

I have always felt compassion for the planet. Sometime I just start to get emotional. I cry because I can almost feel the pain in the air. I put it in words and in song and in dance I think that is what artistry is. — Michael Jackson

Biology designed the dance. Terror timed it. Dictated the rhythm with which their bodies answered each other. As though they already knew that for each tremor of pleasure they would pay with an equal measure of pain. As though they knew that how far they went would be measured against how far they would be taken. — Arundhati Roy

Then come the lights shining on you from above. You are a performer. You forget all you learned, the process of technique, the fear, the pain, you even forget who you are you become one with the music, the lights, indeed one with the dance. — Shirley Maclaine

What is the world? What is it for?
It is an art. It is the best of all possible art, a finite picture of the infinite. Assess it like prose, like poetry, like architecture, sculpture, painting, dance, delta blues, opera, tragedy, comedy, romance, epic. Assess it like you would a Faberge egg, like a gunfight, like a musical, like a snowflake, like a death, a birth, a triumph, a love story, a tornado, a smile, a heartbreak, a sweater, a hunger pain, a desire, a fufillment, a desert, a waterfall, a song, a race, a frog, a play, a song, a marriage, a consummation, a thirst quenched.
Assess it like that. And when you're done, find an ant and have him assess the cathedrals of Europe. — N.D. Wilson

I could've missed the pain, but I would've missed the dance. — Garth Brooks

A tease is a con. You press a spot because you know that it can be pressed, and while the sucker is feeling the pleasure or the pain resulting from the pressure, you take something from him ... A flirt doesn't do that. A flirt does a dance within the context of giving pleasure. Referring to this, referring to that. And suddenly, following the references, you find a little surprise. Nothing enormous. Nothing like 'Feed on me.' Nothing like that. Something small with a bow on it. It's a pleasure. A surprise, and a *gift*. — George W. S. Trow

If we succumb to fear, we start holding back, and do that all-to-common dance of getting close, then pulling away. When we remember that our safe harbor depends on our awareness and honesty, we're less likely to make internal compromises, put on masks, or act like a chameleon to attract a partner or keep a hurtful relationship together. If we live by truth, we may have pain, but we will always rest securely in ourselves. — Charlotte Kasl

How did she do it, I'd always wondered. Dancing with Q., I understood. Once in a while the pain falls asleep on the job, and the experienced sufferer knows enough to seize such moments swiftly and without thought - for when we realize we're actually dancing, the jolt of joy wakens the pain.
Laura Acosta — Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Always be like a water. Float in the times of pain or dance like waves along the wind which touches its surface. — Santosh Kalwar

Dance your pain, sing your sorrows, because there is nothing else tomorrow. — Santosh Kalwar

Sweat your prayers, dance your pain, and move on. — Gabrielle Roth

Some will make you Dance, some will make you Smile, and some will make your misery longer than a mile! Pleasure or Pain, the Choice is thine. — R.v.m.

When you realize that you live in, that indeed you are this moment now, and no other, that apart from this there is no past and no future, you must relax and taste to the full, whether it be pleasure or pain. At once it becomes obvious why this universe exists, why conscious beings have been produced, why sensitive organs, why space, time, and change. The whole problem of justifying nature, of trying to make life mean something in terms of its future, disappears utterly. Obviously, it all exists for this moment.

It is a dance, and when you are dancing you are not intent on getting somewhere. You go round and round, but not under the illusion that you are pursuing something, or fleeing from the jaws of hell. — Alan W. Watts

About the time he threatened her nose with his finger, Peaseblossom lost her grip on the situation with the boys. The door crashed open, and three irate fairies launched themselves at the Stage Manager. Cobweb and Moth pelted him with sequins while Mustardseed rammed beads into his ears.
"Dance!" they commanded, and dance he did, hopping with impotent anger and pain from one foot to the other as he batted his meaty hands at them. — Lisa Mantchev

When I dance I feel as if I'm flying. When I hit the ground I can't breathe.
You have to leap as far as you can away from pain
Before it can hurt you — Dancer

With the aurora borealis flaming coldly overhead, or the stars leaping in the frost dance, and the land numb and frozen under its pall of snow, this song of the huskies might have been the defiance of life, only it was pitched in minor key, with long-drawn wailings and half-sobs, and was more the pleading of life, the articulate travail of existence. It was an old song, old as the breed itself - one of the first songs of the younger world in a day when songs were sad. It was invested with the woe of unnumbered generations, this plaint by which Buck was so strangely stirred. When he moaned and sobbed, it was with the pain of living that was of old the pain of his wild fathers, and the fear and mystery of the cold and dark that was to them fear and mystery. — Jack London

This wasn't music to dance to - it was music to worship, music to fill in the gaps of my soul, to bring me to a place where there was no pain. — Sarah J. Maas

We are designed to dance. To use our bodies as weapons of grace, beauty and intrigue. We are designed to stretch until we master growth. To replace old dead cells and be physically renewed each moment. So challenges don't destroy us, they just should make us dance more swiftly and passionately. For when we dance we please God. Especially when we dance in brokenness. — Phindiwe Nkosi

Today was the dance contest, the one where Squidward takes over Spongebob's body ... During the competition, Squidward gets a cramp and Spongebob's body ends up writhing on the floor in agony. The audience thinks this is pretty cool and gives him First Prize. Quite a metaphor. The person in the most pain wins. Does that mean I get a Blue Ribbon? — Tom Perrotta

You have no idea what this country truly is, my carefree young mistress. You've only shed tears for another dress you could not get, another dance you were denied, another piece of jewelry you lost. Do you know what starvation can do to a proud soul? Do you know the thoughts that injustice can bring to the innermost parts of a person's mind? No. You avoid beggars on the street as if they are plagues - instead of humans who wish they could be born to your birth; you enjoy your winter ice cream by the fireplace while hundreds of those ones whom you call 'dregs' are freezing to death on the street; you enjoy the feeling of superiority you get from bestowing your charity on those who receive it in trade for their pride. You don't care to give a thought to their pain or frustration when they have to wear their ingratiating smile as a mask. This world judges people not by their deeds, their talents, or their morals - only by their birth and wealth. — Catherine Aerie

On a scale from one to ten, how much of a pain was I after my injury?
And please be honest.
Do you think I would hold back on you?
Unfortunately, no.
On a scale from one to ten? Thirteen.
Fair enough.
Now I have a question for you.
On a scale from one to ten, how annoyed were you that I was going to the dance with someone else?
Infinity. — Elizabeth Eulberg

Life is fury, he'd thought. Fury - sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal - drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. Out of furia comes creation, inspiration, originality, passion, but also violence, pain, pure unafraid destruction, the giving and receiving of blows from which we never recover. The Furies pursue us; Shiva dances his furious dance to create and also to destroy. But never mind about gods! Sara ranting at him represented the human spirit in its purest, least socialized form. This is what we are, what we civilize ourselves to disguise - the terrifying human animal in us, the exalted, transcendent, self-destructive, untramelled lord of creation. — Salman Rushdie

I have to find my happy thoughts, and my pain, and let them do their alchemic dance to become words, sentences, paragraphs, pages, and eventually a novel. It always seems a little improbable that I can sit at a blank computer screen and just keep typing until I have a whole book. It's like getting into your car with a full tank of gas, but no idea where you're going, or how long the journey will be, but there's an envelope in the glove compartment. It will contain the first clue, and the direction to start driving.

What direction do we start? South - lets burn this mother fucker down! — Laurell K. Hamilton

Another vital skill is managing pain. All the craziness in the world comes from people trying to escape suffering. All mixed up behaviour comes from unprocessed pain. People drink, hit their mates and children, gamble, cut themselves with razors and even kill themselves in an attempt to escape pain. I teach girls to sit with their pain, to listen to it for messages about their lives, to acknowledge and describe it rather than to run from it. They learn to write about pain, to talk about it, to express it through exercise, art, dance or music. — Mary Pipher

Another sharp pang stabbed him in the ribs and made him jolt with a grunt.

"Are you in pain?"

Alex smirked. 'I've been bludgeoned within an inch of me life, ye expecting me to jump up and dance a jig? — Amy Jarecki

Shane's dad stopped the van," Claire said. "He took Monica as a hostage."
For a second, neither one of them moved, and then Eve whooped and held up her hand for a high five. Claire just stared at her, and Eve compensated by clapping both hands over her head. "Yesssss!" she said, and did a totally geeky victory dance. "Couldn't have happened to a nicer psycho!"
"Hey!" Claire yelled, and Eve froze in midcelebration. It was stupid, but Claire was angry; she knew Eve was right, knew she had no reason at all to think Monica was ever going to be anything but a gigantic pain in the ass, but ... "Shane's dad's going to burn her if they go through with the execution. He has a blowtorch."
The glee dropped out of Eve's expression. "Oh," she said. "Well ... still. Not like she didn't ask for it. Karma's a bitch, and so am I. — Rachel Caine

The real self of an artiste lies in art, so when an artiste performs, all the pain, trauma and tension get released through art, be it dancing, painting, singing, writing or even martial arts. — Mrinalini Sarabhai

Dance with the sufis, celebrate your top ten in the charts of pain. — Tori Amos

Poetry is a storm asking peace to dance with her. — Jenim Dibie

My dance teacher said "you are not a real dancer until your toes bleed from pointing all day" so I did just that. At that time when I went back to her she said "bravo. You have learned to live with pain. You are a real dancer. — Dancer

Pain is a partner I did not request;
This is a dance I did not ask to join;
whirled in a waltz when I would stop and rest,
Jolted and jerked, I ache in bone and loin.
Pain strives to hold me close in his embrace;
If I resist and try to pull away
His grasp grows tighter; closer comes his face;
hotter his breath. If he is here to stay
Then must I learn to dance this painful dance,
Move to its rhythm, keep my lagging feet
In time with his. Thus have I a chance
To work with pain, and so may pain defeat.
Pain is my partner. If I dance with pain
Then may this wedlock be not loss but gain. — Madeleine L'Engle

But our wounds are part of who we are ... and there is nothing left to chance ... And pain's the pen that writes the songs ... That call us forth to dance — Michael Card

To dance is not to jump to your feet and rise painlessly in the air like dust. To rise above both worlds is to dance in the blood of your pain and give up your life. — Jalaluddin Rumi

Some people dance with singing rain; some people get wet with misery and pain. — Debasish Mridha

We did not ask for this room or this music. We were invited in. Therefore, because the dark surrounds us, let us turn our faces to the light. Let us endure hardship to be grateful for plenty. We have been given pain to be astounded by joy. We have been given life to deny death. We did not ask for this room or this music. But because we are here, let us dance. — Stephen King

Bound for your distant home"

Bound for your distant home
you were leaving alien lands.
In an hour as sad as I've known
I wept over your hands.
My hands were numb and cold,
still trying to restrain
you, whom my hurt told
never to end this pain.

But you snatched your lips away
from our bitterest kiss.
You invoked another place
than the dismal exile of this.
You said, 'When we meet again,
in the shadow of olive-trees,
we shall kiss, in a love without pain,
under cloudless infinities.'

But there, alas, where the sky
shines with blue radiance,
where olive-tree shadows lie
on the waters glittering dance,
your beauty, your suffering,
are lost in eternity.
But the sweet kiss of our meeting ......
I wait for it: you owe it me ....... — Alexander Pushkin

You could have missed the pain, but you'd have had to miss the dance,' — Carolyn Brown

When Maggie became conscious that she was the person he sought, she felt, in spite of all the thought that had gone before, a glowing gladness at heart. Her eyes and cheeks were still brightened with her childlike enthusiasm in the dance; her whole frame was set to joy and tenderness; even the coming pain could not seem bitter
she was ready to welcome it as a part of life, for life at this moment seemed a keen vibrating consciousness poised above please or pain. This one, this last night, she might expand unrestrainedly in the warmth of the present without those chill, eating thoughts of the past and the future. — George Eliot

Death. Life. They are in the air, the water, the earth, and the fire that surround us. They co-mingle like a dance of weeping and rejoicing. The joy and pain become one. We are of a dualistic nature." ---Jennifer Mills — Dianne Bright

In the end, it doesn't matter a damn bit. We thought we were special, opening our perceptions, honing our empathy, spilling that cauldron of shared pain onto the dance floor of language and then trying to make a minuet out of all that chaotic hurt. It doesn't matter a damn bit. We're no avatars, no sons of god or man. We're only us, scribbling our conceits alone, reading alone, and dying alone. Goddamn it hurts. — Dan Simmons

Then the young men, streaming blood on their painted chests and backs, would stand and begin their dancing and chanting, leaning back from or toward the sacred tree so that their bodies were often suspended totally by the rawhide and horn under their muscles. And always they stared at the sun as they danced and chanted. Sometimes they danced the full two days. More often, they would dance and leap until the pain caused them to fall unconscious or - if they were lucky and Wakan Tanka smiled on them - until the rawhide and horn ripped through their powerful chest or back muscles and freed them. — Dan Simmons

For every day that there is sunshine, there will be days of rain, it's how we dance within them both that shows our love and pain. — Joey Tolbert

Don't talk then. Paint. Dance. Write. Just don't hold your feelings inside. The longer we let pain hide in our hearts, the more it turns to poison. — Chelsea Sedoti

To be lovingly present through the primal, naked pain that marks aspects of birth, and to be lovingly present through the difficult, heart-wrenching ending that marks aspects of death is to learn about life and love. Fear may be strong but love is stronger. Learning how to love includes learning how to make room for and transform fear. Learning how to live involves learning how to die. Love alone is the most potent power illuminating the breath's journey in between these thresholds. Love is the key. Love is the dance. — Amy Wright

The week passed by swiftly, like a dream ... a dream where minutes flew as rapidly as heartbeats. Such a breathless week when something within her drove Scarlett with mingled pain and pleasure to pack and cram every minute with incidents to remember after he was gone, happenings which she could examine at leisure in the long months ahead, extracting every morsel of comfort from them - dance, sing, laugh, fetch and carry for Ashley, anticipate his wants, smile when he smiles, be silent when he talks, follow him with your eyes so that each line of his erect body, each lift of his eyebrows, each quirk of his mouth, will be indelibly printed on your mind - for a week goes by so fast and the war goes on forever. — Margaret Mitchell

When you weep, Jesus weeps with you. And together you enter into the dance of tears. The dance of tears with Jesus is a precious intimacy He shares only with those who have known deep suffering. In the dance of tears, Jesus shares your pain. He carries your deep sorrows in His everlasting arms. And He ultimately turns your mourning into dancing. He revives and saves your crushed spirit. What a blessed comfort in our deepest darkness to know the One who shares the depth of every pain and loss, every joy and gladness. Jesus, He is the One. — Catherine Martin

He considered her ruthless, in his moments of pain, but also in moments of happiness, experienced mere feet from her but bound right wrist to left ankle by her rules: nothing could evolve, nothing could be consummated, nothing repressed could surface, nothing previously accepted could be ignored. One must not speak of it, in case one could no longer sing of it. Instead, she only kept directing his attention to the wondrously charged air they could tame and make dance between them. — Arthur Phillips

Where, then, do we find the truth? We find it in the body, in the woods, in the water, in the soil. We find it in music, dance, and sometimes in poetry. We find it in a baby's face, and in the adult's face behind the mask. We find it in each other's eyes, when we look. We find it in an embrace, which is, when we feel into it, being to being, an incredibly intimate act. We find it in laughter and sobs, and we find it in the voice behind the spoken word. We find it in fairy tales and myths, and the tales we tell, even if fictional. Sometimes embroidering a tale enlarges it as a vehicle for the truth. We find it in silence and stillness. We find it in pain and loss. We find it in birth and death. — Charles Eisenstein

God's will is determined by His wisdom which always perceives, and His goodness which always embraces the intrinsically good. But when we have said that God commands thing only because they are good, we must add that one of the things intrinsically good is that rational creatures should freely surrender themselves to their Creator in obedience. The content of our obedience - the thing we are commanded to do -- will always be something intrinsically good, something we ought to do even if (by an impossible supposition_ God had not commanded it. But in addition to the content, the mere obeying is also intrinsically good, for, in obeying a rational creature consciously enacts its creaturely role, reverses the act by which we fill, treads Adam's dance backward, and returns. — C.S. Lewis

It takes two to tango, and if you dance too long, implosion is inevitable. — Allie Burke

He built a fort around, making it impossible for anyone to go near him. And he sat near the window watching her dance in the rain, with someone else. — Akshay Vasu

I find the dead easier to be around than the dying. They are not in pain, not afraid of death. There are no awkward silences and conversations that dance around the obvious. They aren't scary...Cadavers, once you get used to them--and you do that quite fast--are surprisingly easy to be around. — Mary Roach

Each of the givens or conditions of existence evokes a question about our destiny. Are we here to get our way or to dance with the flow of life? Are we here to make sure everything goes according to our plans or to trust the surprises and synchronicities that lead us to new vistas? Are we here to make sure we get a fair deal or are we here to be upright and loving? Are we here to avoid pain or to deal with it, grow from it, and learn to be compassionate through it? Are we here to be loyally loved by everyone or to love with all our might? The — David Richo

Success, failure, pain, small furry animals, household products, freeways, Star Wars systems - all are interlinked in the dance of tantra, the disco of the mind, the ballroom of cosmic consciousness. — Frederick Lenz

We are made of the stuff of stars, given our lives by a living world, given our selves by time. We are brother to the trees and sister to the sun. We are of such glorious stuff we need not carry pain around like a label. Our duty, as living things, to be sure that pain is not our whole story, for we can choose to be otherwise. As Ellin says, we can choose to dance. — Sheri S. Tepper

Any dance of celebration must weave both the sorrows and the blessings into a joyful step ... To heal is to let the Holy Spirit call me to dance, to believe again, even amid my pain, that God will orchestrate and guide my life. — Henri Nouwen

That is what they call being reconciled to die. They call it reconciled when pain has strummed a symphony of suffering back and forth across you, up and down, round and round you until each little fibre is worn tissue-thin with aching. And when you are lying beaten, and buffeted, battered and broken - pain goes out, joins hands with Death and comes back to dance, dance, dance, stamp, stamp, stamp down on you until you give up. — Marita Bonner

Because wanton or venal lips has murmured the same words to him, he only half believed in the sincerity of those he was hearing now; to a large extent they should be disregarded, he believed, because such exaggerated language must surely mask commonplace feelings: as if the soul in its fullness did not sometimes overflow into the most barren metaphors, since no one can ever tell the precise measures of his own needs, of his own ideas, of his own pain, and human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when what we long to do is make music that will move the stars to pity. — Gustave Flaubert

When our identity expands to include everything, we find a peace with the dance of the world. The ocean of life rises and falls within us - birth and death, joy and pain, it is all ours, and our heart is full and empty, large enough to embrace it all. — Jack Kornfield

I walk the sand alone,
and feel it stirring as I roam,
upon this breathing earth,
where wave on wave begins new birth.
I sense a grand facade,
where colors paint the hand of God.
And in remorseful pain,
I dance the stones of bitter strain. — Craig Froman

Dancers dance through their pain I shrink from mine. — Mason Cooley

The wheel goes round and round and round forever. Pleasure, pain, birth and death, lifetime after lifetime, it is endless. All sentient beings experience this, the endless dance of life, the lila. — Frederick Lenz

Smile despite the pain. Dance despite the rain. turn the negatives into positives again and again. — R.v.m.

You spend your life dreaming, running 'round in a trance, You hang out forever and still miss the dance, And if you get lucky, you might find someone, To help you get over the pain that will come. — Tom Petty

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