Top 40 Suzanne Farrell Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Eating a healthy diet is not just about eating a few special foods. There’s a bigger picture. You need to practice moderation, eat a variety of foods, and get enough physical activity.”

— Suzanne Farrell

2. “When you are on stage in front of an audience, you want to engage the entire crowd. If a thousand people are in the theater, you need to dance a thousand different ways, not one-thousandth of a way.”

— Suzanne Farrell

3. “I had two sisters, and we would love to get dressed up and pretend that we were chic, sophisticated ladies. And I think that was a great sort of preparation, in a way.”

— Suzanne Farrell

4. “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.”

— Suzanne Farrell

5. “Plie is the first thing you learn and the last thing you master.”

— Suzanne Farrell

6. “I didn’t care too much for ballet, because you had to be more disciplined, and you sort of looked like everyone else. It required a certain kind of conformity that I didn’t feel like I wanted to do.”

— Suzanne Farrell

7. “Of course, in the art class, I was the model.”

— Suzanne Farrell

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

— Suzanne Farrell

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

— Suzanne Farrell

10. “I set as my goal to be the best dancer I could be. Not the most famous, or the highest paid dancer, just the best I could be. Out of this discipline came great freedom and calm.”

— Suzanne Farrell

11. “Do not brood. It makes the moment you are living in unavailable for learning and life.”

— Suzanne Farrell

12. “Dancers are a great breed of people. And they really want to dance so you don’t have to beg them to work. However, dancers sometimes build walls around themselves because they are presenting themselves all the time: dancing is very much a confession.”

— Suzanne Farrell

13. “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.”

— Suzanne Farrell

14. “I liked Latin, I like languages, I liked all the myths, and the Roman tales that we were required to translate in Latin, and all these interesting people who were never quite what they thought they would be or seemed to be.”

— Suzanne Farrell

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

— Suzanne Farrell

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

— Suzanne Farrell

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

— Suzanne Farrell

18. “That the work involved, the willingness to take chances, the commitment, the opportunity to get on stage and make people happy, was more important than becoming famous, or even what I was dancing.”

— Suzanne Farrell

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

— Suzanne Farrell

20. “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.”

— Suzanne Farrell

21. “You’re never more of an individual than when you’re a happy team player.”

— Suzanne Farrell

22. “I loved the stage not because it provided an escape from myself or my humdrum life but because when the curtain went up I could be whoever I wanted to be, and that was true freedom – to be myself.”

— Suzanne Farrell

23. “After I stopped dancing, I was unable to listen to beautiful music.”

— Suzanne Farrell

24. “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.”

— Suzanne Farrell

25. “I was very much of a tomboy.”

— Suzanne Farrell

26. “The particular ballet was not so important as the fact that I was physically healthy, and capable of getting out there and dancing as often as possible.”

— Suzanne Farrell

27. “I was very happy that I was as normal as possible before I went into serious dance.”

— Suzanne Farrell

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

— Suzanne Farrell

29. “The stage is not the place to remind the audience that one is human. Illusion is what they are paying for.”

— Suzanne Farrell

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

— Suzanne Farrell

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

— Suzanne Farrell

32. “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.”

— Suzanne Farrell

33. “In fact, ballet companies did not exist in the Midwest when I was a child.”

— Suzanne Farrell

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

— Suzanne Farrell

35. “I could work out a lot of my emotions by going to class and dancing.”

— Suzanne Farrell

36. “I had a wonderful childhood, coming from Cincinnati, and I think that it was great going into the life that I was going to have, where you have to start young as a dancer.”

— Suzanne Farrell

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

— Suzanne Farrell

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

— Suzanne Farrell

39. “I learned to love dance for its own sake.”

— Suzanne Farrell

40. “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.”

— Suzanne Farrell

41. “Good theater should always send people away feeling changed.”

— Suzanne Farrell

42. “I think it was important that I learned to love to dance eventually for its own sake, as opposed to wanting to be a ballerina.”

— Suzanne Farrell

43. “Treat each class as if it were your first.”

— Suzanne Farrell

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

— Suzanne Farrell

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

— Suzanne Farrell