Dreaming Up the Dreaming Up Daily Quote

Quotations are odd things these days.  They are everywhere on the Internet, hardly ever sourced, and often wrong.  The most famous quotation from the novel It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis ("When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross”) is not in It Can't Happen Here.  (Although it might be in one of the stage play versions.  I'm involved in a 75th anniversary reading of it next month--more on that anon--so I'll check it out.) 

But I love quotations--the ones that are like poems, or very good jokes, or that sum something up with terse eloquence.  Especially a new insight, or expressed so eloquently that it becomes new.  They nourish.

For some years now I've been seeing a quotation floating around--it's from a letter that Martha Graham wrote to Agnes De Mille, the two legendary American dance pioneers of the 20th century.  But I didn't see it first as a quotation, not exactly.  I was reading Agnes De Mille's autobiography one night in bed in my first Pittsburgh apartment (on the South Side).  It was a used paperback I found on a bookstore crawl.  I remember I felt cold and the print was fading as I started falling asleep, but I was coming to the end of a chapter, and indeed to the end of the first volume in this two-volume paperback.  And that's where I saw it.  It exploded me wide awake with a rush I still remember.

I soon copied it out and quoted it, eventually in my newspaper column in the In Pittsburgh weekly.  I even had it up on the wall, at home at first and then in my office at the editorial firm where I worked for a couple of years.  I didn't start seeing it quoted until long after that, though I doubt that I was the source of it.  But you never know--quotes went viral long before the Internet. Anyway, here it is:

"There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.  There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others."