Quotes from Suzanne Farrell

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Treat each class as if it were your first.

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.

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

Plie is the first thing you learn and the last thing you master.

If he had thought at one time that he wanted something I couldn't give him, I hoped that now he knew that in truth he did get everything ... everything I had to give, the best of me.

I was in a place composed of tall spires. There was a sound, not Mozartiana, but a kind of shattering, prophetic, organ-like sound, and I was walking on the vibrating spires upward from one pinnacle to another. It wasn't precarious. My footing was very stable; I was holding on to the air.

People have asked me what it was like to be on that stage, where I had lived so many lives, knowing it was the last time. Did my whole career pass through my mind in a flash? No, it didn't. It was not a memorial, it was a celebration. I felt like Cinderella at the ball, and I had been there all my life. It was roses without thorns.

in England. If you are awake it's already vulgar." The

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.

I can't read a note. I have lots of discipline, but I can't sit still at any instrument.

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

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.

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.

The arts are the hospitals for our souls.