Daily Inspiration Quote by Suzanne Farrell

“I was very much of a tomboy” lands like a small act of defiance from someone the public files under “ballerina”: an art form marketed as weightless, obedient, pink. Suzanne Farrell’s phrasing is plain, almost stubbornly unpoetic, which is exactly why it works. She isn’t dressing the memory up in lyrical nostalgia; she’s insisting on a body and temperament that didn’t naturally conform to the feminine script ballet often demands. The emphasis is doing quiet work here. “Very much” isn’t a cute aside, it’s a stake in the ground: this wasn’t a phase or a coy anecdote, it was identity.

The subtext reads as a preemptive rebuttal to the way dancers, especially women, get flattened into aesthetic objects. Farrell was famously associated with Balanchine, whose ballets could elevate women to near-myth while also requiring fierce discipline and a willingness to be shaped. By foregrounding her tomboyness, she reclaims agency: before she was a muse, she was a kid who likely preferred speed, rough edges, and competence over prettiness. It reframes her technique as something earned through grit, not granted by “natural” femininity.

Culturally, the line taps into a mid-century American vocabulary for gender-nonconforming girlhood that was tolerated as childhood, then often policed at adolescence. Farrell uses that label without apology, suggesting continuity rather than correction. In a field obsessed with line, softness, and compliance, “tomboy” becomes shorthand for stamina, blunt will, and the refusal to be decorative.