The Ballerinas Quotes

“Ballerinas are like pointe shoes: you have to break them down before they're of any use.”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Ballerinas

“This is the promise we dancers make to each other: the world might not remember you, but the other ballerinas always will.”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Ballerinas

“Everything good is risky....The thing that you have to remember is that if you -don't- risk anything, you risk everything.

[Lindsay Price, to Delphine Léger]”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Ballerinas

“I don't think you should be afraid of butterflies anymore," she said.
"I'm too old for it?"
"No, it's not that," Stella said, turning toward the door. "It's only--it's funny, isn't it? It's completely counter-evolutionary. How we're scared of things that we might break. So much of our focus goes there. Protecting them, caring for them."
"Well, what should we be afraid of instead?"
"Why, the things that might break us, of course," said Stella.”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Ballerinas

“I suggest you be more careful in the future." I blinked up at him, and he patted my hand. "It's the innocent people who need lawyers, Mademoiselle Léger. After all, there are only so many arguments one can make for the guilty.”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Ballerinas

“Wouldn’t that be a tidy ending to the story? Nice and neat, all smoothed over. The abuser gets pushed out the window, saved by female friendship and camaraderie and the indelible bonds that men like to think bind women together. They never see the places where those bonds fray; they don’t care enough to look.”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Ballerinas

“think,” he said, “that a man who is surrounded exclusively by women, without a single male friend, shouldn’t be entirely trusted. A man who ignores anybody who can’t further his career or whom he doesn’t want to sleep with can’t be entirely trusted. I think that a thirty-six-year-old man who blames his parents for everything that’s currently wrong in his life…” He dropped the parallel, paused. “I think he’s dangerous.”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Ballerinas

“Every institution that employs young women inevitably places those young women at the bottom of the ladder. And every artistic institution deals with people whose outsize ambitions and egos mean they will do anything to get ahead. I’d watched all the Me Too scandals unfold—Weinstein,”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Ballerinas

“St. Petersburg’s wedding-cake mansions were an oil painting, Paris’s hôtels particuliers a watercolor. St. Petersburg’s skies were Technicolor, Paris’s a muted pastel. Petersburgians were hard, unyielding, while Parisians were—something else. Scanning my emails on the Métro, I”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Ballerinas

“A feeling that everyone you’ve ever loved has found a place at the grown-up table and here you are, still searching. Still grasping, still alone.”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Ballerinas

“In the studio mirrors, their bodies become architecture; their movements, traffic. They are the only citizens of their private city, borders closed off long ago.”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Ballerinas

“Before Nathalie emailed and offered to take me back, before I killed anyone, I saw variations of the same quotation everywhere: Paris is always a good idea. On mugs, on throw pillows, on Instagram. Always attributed to Audrey Hepburn, always in pink. I couldn’t escape it; everywhere I went, there were those fucking words.”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Ballerinas

“What are you supposed to do when you still have a teenager's dreams but you somehow got old?”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Ballerinas

“When you're the best at something, your world is small - your life is small.”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Ballerinas

“Walking through an airport is the only way to be somewhere and nowhere at the same time.

[Delphine Léger]”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Ballerinas

“We are all stuck in our own stories. And it is so easy to see someone through only one lens: the role they play in yours.

[Delphine Léger]”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Ballerinas

“Ballerinas are like pointe shoes. You have to break them down before they're of any use.”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Ballerinas

“Even after taking time off after my mother died, I'd never gotten back the spark of joy that dancing had once brought me. The accomplishment that had throbbed in my chest after a perfectly executed adagio, had dissolved into a dull relief that it was over. That I had gotten through it. The ballet had been the only arena that counted for me, a place where my sculpted physical perfection took me soaring to emotional heights, or plunged me down into the depths of obsession. But now, it was just one flat plane of gray. It was all too clear to me: Even if I achieved the absolutely most I possibly could, even if I succeeded in following in my mother's footsteps, where would it take me? I'd only end up next to her in that same awful crypt...I wanted something else, anything else. A story I didn't already know the ending of.”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Ballerinas

“I'd done everything in my power to get here. Things I never thought I'd do: slept with a choreographer, betrayed a friend. Not only could I not push myself any further, I couldn't even imagine what "further" would look like. I was tired deep in my bones, down where I felt the truth of his words. And I'd done it all to crawl my way, where? To the middle?”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Ballerinas

“I couldn't have the things the world outside of dance offered because I'd committed to ballet and it was a life-long commitment, though I hadn't known it at the time. It had changed the way I saw, the way I felt, the way I moved through the world.”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Ballerinas

“You think once you've gotten into the company, you've made it. It's all over. The struggle and the suffering. The longing and the dreams. Part of it is just the way we treat life, like there's this dividing line between childhood and adulthood that we'll arrive at, pass through. But you never do cross over, because it doesn't actually exist. Officially entering the company was the greatest achievement of my life, I'd done it. Alone among our classmates, Margo, Lindsey and I had realized our dream. Our peers had to put themselves through the grueling, dispiriting process of auditioning for other, lesser countries throughout France and Europe. But after all of that, then, I was just there in the company, and I had the lowest possible rank. As always, another hoop to jump through, another step to climb, when I was a student, I thought I wouldn't care that being part of POB would be enough. Of course it wasn't, I wanted to be the best.”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Ballerinas

“How long can you fool yourself about the purpose of your life if you're not actually doing what defines you? An insurance salesman who doesn't sell insurance is just a man. A lifeguard away from the pool is just a person. Dance is what I do. It was a simple and as messed up as that.”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Ballerinas

“I didn’t know exactly what would come next—lately, I’d allowed myself to imagine running a dance company of my own, composed entirely of women. The idea was terrifying, exhilarating, transfixing. I knew now, finally, that those feelings were hard to come by. You had to pay attention when they showed up.”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Ballerinas

“But the answer to both of those question was the same. She wasn’t doing anything to me. She was doing it to herself. Not doing it. Letting it happen. Letting it go. It wasn’t about me.

Everyone had changed since I’d returned to Paris. The sketches of the people we’d been in my memories were now shaded with levels of chiaroscuro. Everyone was more than I remembered: more complex, more complicated. More than they’d been before.”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Ballerinas

“And I missed something bigger, too. Something that had never been part of our relationship: a true recognition of who she was. I was an adult now, and she was a person I wanted to know—on her terms.

We are all stuck in our own stories. And it is so easy to see someone through only one lens: the role they play in yours. Stella had been right. I’d only ever seen her as a guru, a mentor, the friendly neighborhood witch. Who was Stella in her own story?”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Ballerinas

“Sometimes,” she said, squeezing my fingers and letting them go, “I think the real tragedy of life is that we’re always the people we were, and it’s only our outsides that change. And then one day we wake up to find we’re the only adults left in the room—but inside, we’re all just children pretending.”

My throat tightened. “So what are we supposed to do?”

She smiled. “You rise to the occasion. You step up. You take responsibility for your actions, you do your best to be a force for good in the world. And you keep close to the people who have known you through both the highs and lows of your life. They see the person you are at your core. The one you’ve always been”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Ballerinas

“Maybe, in the end, the romantics dreaming about Paris see the same thing in the city that I do: that empty stage. A place where the rough edges are sloughed off behind the scenes, where the pain disappears behind pale pink smiles and satin, where the stage lights erase all shadows as they illuminate you with an otherworldly glow.”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Ballerinas

“Pas de Deux class was like getting your first period: you knew it was coming for years before it arrived; it sounded incredibly unpleasant and impossibly terrifying; and it was entirely necessary... The pas de deux, where the man and the woman dance together, is key to the ballet. To every ballet.”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Ballerinas

“I want to make a ballet that really means something to me. Something that's not just about being decorative--something that shows the world what it's like to . . . I don't know, to fall in love, to have this experience that's supposed to be the epitome of a woman's life and have it be the best thing that ever happened to you--and then to have it become your downfall.”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Ballerinas

“My mother set her fork down against the checkered oilcloth. She only ever ate half of any meal set before her (The secret of my success, she used to say, scraping the leftovers into the garbage can)...”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Ballerinas