Suzanne Farrell Quotes

Of course, in the art class, I was the model.

I liked tap, because I liked hearing the results of my movements.

I’m thought of as a cool, unemotional dancer, but inside I’m not.

I was very much of a tomboy.

On the other hand, I think it is wonderful for everyone to take ballet classes, at any age. It gives you a discipline, it gives you a place to go. It gives you some control in your life.

The body can do amazing things in a situation when it is really called for.

There is pain and sacrifice in everyone’s world. That’s why, when I was dancing, I had no pain.

I didn’t have any doubts about my choice of career, but I had constant doubts about my ability, yes.

I liked to read but, being a dancer, I didn’t have a lot of time to read.

You don’t learn from a situation where you do something well. You enjoy it and you give yourself credit, but you don’t really learn from that. You learn from trial and error, trial and error, all the time.

I learned to love dance for its own sake.

I loved tests because it was another form of competing, a healthy competition.

Once I started dancing, I was not the spoiled brat or the rebellious child that I was as a child.

Even though I am a professional, and I know what the steps are, I don’t quite know how I’m going to do them, because I haven’t lived that moment yet. I always feel very insecure and I get very excited.

But what was my motivation was music, and the fact that I love to move around. I’m always moving around.

So dancing was not something I had a great desire to do.

When you get on stage, you can be anything. You are removed from reality in a way, the real world.

When you are on stage, you don’t see faces. The lights are in your eyes and you see just this black void out in front of you. And yet you know there is life out there, and you have to get your message across.

I used to love to play dress-up, where you get your mother’s or your grandmother’s dresses and high heels.

As soon as I hear music, something in me starts to vibrate.

I think especially in a world where you have so little say about what goes on in your life, or in the politics of the world around you, it is wonderful to go into that studio, and tell yourself what to do.

And I just thought, this is what I want to be. And I knew that dancing would be my chosen profession.

The steps must be second nature to me, so that the music seems to be drawing the steps out of me and I don’t look as if I’m struggling to fit the steps to the music.

It’s ungrateful to be wishing you were doing something else at the moment you are living. You haven’t lived in the moment that you are really living, you are wishing you were somewhere else.

I like dramatic ballets, particularly if they’re ballets in which I have a chance to go from one extreme of style or characterization to another.