Daily Inspiration Quote by Suzanne Farrell

There is something quietly defiant in the way Suzanne Farrell lingers on Latin: not as a dead language, but as a living discipline of attention. A dancer praising translation makes perfect sense. Ballet is, at heart, translation too: stories carried across bodies, centuries, and institutions that insist on “purity” while constantly reinventing themselves. Farrell’s affection for “myths” and “Roman tales” isn’t scholastic nostalgia; it’s a confession about the kind of narrative she trusts - the ones that admit people are complicated, inconsistent, and forever misread.

The kicker is her description of those “interesting people who were never quite what they thought they would be or seemed to be.” That’s not just about characters in Ovid; it’s about identity as performance. Myths are crowded with transformations, disguises, divine projections - the same ingredients that shape a dancer’s public image. Farrell spent her career inside a famously controlling aesthetic world (Balanchine’s orbit) where a ballerina is both artist and symbol. Her line suggests a lifelong skepticism toward surfaces, toward the tidy story others write for you.

Latin translation also implies constraint: fixed grammar, strict forms, the demand to be precise. That maps onto classical technique, where rigor is the price of expressive freedom. Farrell’s intent feels less like “I loved school” and more like: I loved systems that let me excavate meaning. The subtext is a dancer’s credo - learn the structure, honor the myth, then show how the person inside it never quite matches the role.