Daily Inspiration Quote by Suzanne Farrell

The bluntness is the point: Suzanne Farrell takes an art form associated with compulsion, destiny, and childhood obsession and strips it of its usual origin myth. “So dancing was not something I had a great desire to do” lands like an anti-audition story, a refusal of the tidy narrative that great dancers are born wanting nothing else. In a field that practically requires you to perform longing - onstage and in interviews - Farrell’s sentence is a quiet act of realism.

The phrasing is disarmingly flat. “Not something” softens the negation, “a great desire” leaves room for mild curiosity, and the past-tense framing (“was”) implies change without offering a sentimental conversion. It’s a line built to undercut romance while still protecting complexity: she isn’t claiming she hated dance, only that it didn’t begin as a calling. That matters because ballet culture sells sacrifice as proof of legitimacy. Farrell’s subtext says the opposite: discipline can precede passion; talent can arrive before narrative.

Contextually, it reads as a corrective to the way institutions and audiences mythologize dancers, especially women, as creatures of pure devotion. Farrell’s career - marked by towering artistic achievement and high-stakes power dynamics in the Balanchine universe - makes the understatement sharper. If even she didn’t start with “a great desire,” then the gatekeeping idea that only the obsessed deserve the stage starts to look less like truth and more like a story the system tells to justify how much it demands.