A Quote by Anna Halprin

Aging is like enlightenment at gunpoint. Before I had cancer, I lived my life for my art. After I had cancer, I lived my art for my life. I’ve always said dance is the breath made visible. That covers about everything because once you stop breathing and the breath is no longer visible, you stop moving.
I always tell people I'm grateful for my cancer diagnosis because it was the greatest gift because it completely changed my life. I was able to stop and let my whole life and world just crash over me like a wave. And I stood there and went, 'Wow.' And for the first time, I stopped everything. I had to.
I've worked since I was 11 years old, playing music and following the dream, and shaking and moving and doing it. And then, you have cancer and it was like 'Ooooohh.' It was like a big eraser. It was the only thing in my life that had ever made me just stop.
I'm very drawn to the way in which a life lived can be an art of sorts or a failed art, and a life-lived-told can be art as well.
What would it be like if you lived each day, each breath, as a work of art in progress? Imagine that you are a masterpiece unfolding each second of every day, a work of art taking form with every breath.
While I had cancer, I wrote these twenty-two personal essays about how I lived my life backed by Zen and writing.
When my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1991, I asked him if he had any regrets, and he said no. I was a burnt-out litigation solicitor in my thirties, hating my life, and his cancer made me re-evaluate it all.
When you have cancer, it's like you enter a new time zone: the Cancer Zone. Everything in the Tropic of Cancer revolves around your health or your sickness. I didn't want my whole life to revolve around cancer. Life came first; cancer came second.
Cancer has been unfortunately in my life. My mom's best friend is kicking ass in her battle with breast cancer. Both of my grandmas had cancer. I recently lost a friend to cancer.
Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality principle...The encounter with the truth of art happens in the estranging language and images which make perceptible, visible, and audible that which is no longer, or not yet, perceived, said, and heard in everyday life.
Cancer taught me to stop saving things for a special occasion. Every day is special. You don't have to get cancer to start living life to the fullest. My post-cancer philosophy? No wasted time. No ugly clothes. No boring movies.
When I was a street performer, before I had any songs of my own that anybody would stop and put in money for, I would always be doing covers. Even with covers, people wouldn't stop in the beginning.
Art is craft: all art is always and essentially a work of craft: but in the true work of art, before the craft and after it, is some essential durable core of being, which is what the craft works on, and shows, and sets free. The statue in the stone. How does the artist find that, see it, before it's visible? That is a real question.
About the only thing that'll stay with you that you can trust all your life is your breath. Your breath will be there at the very last, because when it stops, you will stop.
If I had given up everything that my life was about ... I'd let cancer win before it needed to.
I don't like life that much. It's not that big a deal for me... I don't want to know I have cancer till it's visible to the naked eye.
There is no difference in quality between a life lived forward and a life lived backwards, she thinks. She had come to love this backward life. It was, after all, the only life she had.
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