Parenting & Family Quote by Suzanne Farrell

Farrell’s line reads like an easy reminiscence, but it’s really a quiet argument about what gets mislabeled as “natural” talent. She frames her childhood as “wonderful” and “great,” yet the emotional warmth doubles as a defense of an unforgiving system: dance isn’t simply a passion you discover, it’s a life you’re drafted into early enough that your body, discipline, and identity can be shaped around it. The Cincinnati detail matters because it signals ordinariness, not glamour. She’s not selling a myth of being born onstage; she’s pointing to a middle-American baseline that had to be converted into elite readiness.

The interesting sleight of hand is how “the life that I was going to have” makes destiny sound both inevitable and earned. It’s a sentence that carries gratitude while acknowledging constraint. Ballet culture often romanticizes sacrifice; Farrell’s phrasing lets her keep the romance (“wonderful childhood”) without denying the requirements (“have to start young”). That “have to” is the hinge: behind the fond memory is a practical truth about gatekeeping. If you start late, you’re not just behind, you’re effectively out.

Contextually, coming of age in mid-century American ballet, Farrell represents a generation when the path to top companies demanded early training, totalizing schedules, and an almost vocational narrowing of childhood. Her quote is less nostalgia than a controlled reframing: childhood wasn’t lost to dance; childhood was the runway that made the flight possible.