The Turnout Quotes

“Ballet was full of dark fairy tales, and how a dancer prepared her pointe shoes was a ritual as mysterious and private as how she might pleasure herself. It was often indistinguishable.”
― Megan Abbott, The Turnout

“The very things that first draw you to a person will eventually be the very things that drive you away.”
― Megan Abbott, The Turnout

“The woman's body twitched suddenly, as if remembering something, and she covered her mouth with a stiff mitten. Dara knew what it was. She'd felt it a dozen times that day already. The body remembering, contorting, -He's gone, he's gone.-

For a moment, only a moment, Dara felt sorry for her.

As if sensing it, the woman looked at her and reached for her sunglasses, removing them at last. Her eyes heavy, swollen.

'I wish I could explain,' she said. 'You build this family. And it's perfect. It's everything you wanted. And then something goes wrong. Slowly or all at once. It was good and now it's bad, and it's his fault. Or he started it. All the ripples from his bad behavior.'

Dara didn't say anything. The woman kept going.

'So, in some private part of your head, you start thinking up fantasies of escape. You tell yourself: If only he were gone, if only a heart attack, a lightning bolt, a car crash...'

'I have to go,' Dara said, turning.

'Sometimes,' the woman said suddenly, her voice choked. 'Sometimes, you think you'd do anything to get out to be free.'

They held glances a long moment....

'You're never free,' Dara said, realizing it as she said it.

-When something goes wrong in a family, it takes generations to wipe it out.- Those words came to Dara, something from a history book, a book about kings and queens she once found in the den long ago.

Marie, Charlie, they thought they could escape it, through leaving, or trying to. Through other people, lovers. But they both ended right back where they started. In their mother's house, her third-floor hideaway.

'I guess you're right,' the woman said. 'You blame everything on that one person.You think if that one person is gone, everything will be perfect and good.' She slid her sunglasses back on. 'But in the end, that person is you.”
― Megan Abbott, The Turnout

“Childhood is the fiery furnace in which we are melted down to essentials and that essential shaped for good. —KATHERINE ANNE PORTER”
― Megan Abbott, The Turnout

“how often do you realize something’s a choice when you make it?”
― Megan Abbott, The Turnout

“guess you’re right,” the woman said. “You blame everything on that one person. You think if that one person is gone, everything will be perfect and good.” She slid her sunglasses back on. “But in the end, that person is you.”
― Megan Abbott, The Turnout

“Consider the exquisite torture of all those little girls never allowed to eat dancing as costumed Sugar Plums, as fat Bonbons gushing cherry slicks. Tutus like ribbon candy, boys spinning great hoops of peppermint, and everywhere black slathers of licorice and marzipan glistening like snow.”
― Megan Abbott, The Turnout

“-Everyone remembers that feeling,- Dara thought. The tortuous waiting of childhood. Waiting for parents, forever, waiting while adults do their adult things. Wanting to understand, the doors always closed. Until the adults finally decide to open them and then there's no shutting the door again.”
― Megan Abbott, The Turnout

“But how can you rescue someone, she said, who doesn't want to be saved?”
― Megan Abbott, The Turnout

“I didn't know a lot of things until I did.”
― Megan Abbott, The Turnout

“You show someone your damage and they know all your weak spots. They know everything.”
― Megan Abbott, The Turnout

“The true terrorism of girls is the accuracy of their aim.”
― Megan Abbott, The Turnout

“Two people, tightly twined, can begin to convince themselves of anything. There’s reality and then there’s the shared experience, which feels so much more real. Two people, needing each other, can come to believe things. Can come to believe wanting something was the same as making it happen. That it wasn’t a choice, in the end, but the right thing to do, the fulfillment of some deeper calling.”
― Megan Abbott, The Turnout

“Never cry over pain, their mother told them. Those are wasted tears.”
― Megan Abbott, The Turnout

“Some people liked to make everything dirty. Some people liked to ruin everything.”
― Megan Abbott, The Turnout

“don’t blame you,” he said, his voice speeding up now. “You were afraid of her. Afraid of both of them. We all were. We wanted to leave, remember? You and me. And then they were gone, so we stayed. But they were still here, weren’t they? They’re still here now. And we just live inside it.” “Stop—” “You forgot somehow. You forgot why you wanted to leave, why we had to leave if we wanted to live. You forgot and just kept going. But I couldn’t. Marie couldn’t”
― Megan Abbott, The Turnout

“It all unfurled like a mink from a femme fatale’s shoulders in an old film noir. All those tales of a taloned beauty with expensive tastes, her callow lover, the unwitting husband, a staged accident for a big insurance payout. They never ended well. Suddenly, Dara felt a coldness inside. It was all so tacky, so déclassé, a voice inside said. It was all so cheap. So unbearably sad.”
― Megan Abbott, The Turnout

“You’re lucky,” Dara said, her voice strange and heavy, “I don’t throw you down those stairs. You’re lucky I don’t kick you out of this studio, our school. Our life. Everything you have is because of me. You don’t have anything of your own. You have nothing.”
― Megan Abbott, The Turnout

“But she couldn’t. They never talked about when Marie moved out, or why. It had been a strained time for all of them and there was no need to stir it all up again. That’s what was so enraging about it all, about that contractor bringing it up. About Marie having told him things.”
― Megan Abbott, The Turnout

“But this thing, this desire to be bossed around, dominated—such a cliché. Such an old, dusty woman thing she’d never understand. She’d never felt it herself.”
― Megan Abbott, The Turnout

“I don’t care. I don’t care. I have no shame. He ate away all my shame.” “No wonder he’s getting tired of you,” Dara said. “I’m tired of you.”
― Megan Abbott, The Turnout

“I’m starting to get the feeling you don’t like me,” he said, smiling again, this time almost as though embarrassed, or something. “But there’s no reason we can’t be friends. And your sister …” “I don’t have to like you,” Dara said, moving past him, a blast of the leather scent in her face. “You’ll be gone soon.”
― Megan Abbott, The Turnout

“Who needs her here anyway, Dara thought, walking through the front door, that familiar scent of mildew, paste, old perfume. Who needed Marie’s buzzy, antic energy, her nighttime pacing and her bad dreams, the way she used all Dara’s tampons and ate all the sardines?”
― Megan Abbott, The Turnout

“Their mother, that swan neck, those elegant arms. Her dark hair gathered up tightly with her grandmother’s dragonfly combs. So dignified, so refined, carrying so much inside all the time. Surrounded all day by mirrors and never letting anyone see.”
― Megan Abbott, The Turnout

“So striking, everyone would say. E-theeeer-real, some would even venture. The littlest girls, padding in in their ballet pinks, would stare up at the photo mounted in the lobby, fingers in their mouths. Like fairy princesses.”
― Megan Abbott, The Turnout

“Charlie in the back office listening to parents bemoan their child’s lack of discipline, the exorbitant cost of pointe shoes, the holiday schedule, Charlie nodding patiently as mothers spoke in hushed tones about their own long-ago ballet aspirations, of the mad fantasy of tutus and rosin, satin and tulle, floodlights and beaming faces, leaping endlessly into a lover’s waiting arms.”
― Megan Abbott, The Turnout

“Charlie, on whom so many students had passing crushes, a rite of passage, like the first time they took a razor blade to their hardened feet, or the first time they achieved turnout, rotating their legs from their hip sockets, bodies pushed to contortion. Pushed so far, the feeling ecstatic. Her first time, Dara felt split open, laid bare.”
― Megan Abbott, The Turnout

“All these years later, the story of their parents’ end, passed down like lore, still seemed unbearably romantic to their students—less so to Marie, who, after sobbing violently next to her sister, Dara, through the funeral, insisted, I never saw them hold hands once.”
― Megan Abbott, The Turnout

“The entire time Tchaikovsky was composing 'The Nutcracker,' Madame Sylvie told Dara once, he was mourning his beloved sister Sasha. He reanimated her through Clara. It explained the strange heaviness of the ballet, its grand melancholy, its piercing nostalgia. And the deathlessness of its vision of childhood, of innocence and escape. Our almost unbearable awareness that everything we're seeing is disappearing even as we watch, fluttering past us as the dancers do, slipping away like smoke.

Every year, when the grand -pas de deux- -- the Sugar Plum Fairy and her Prince--begins, the audience's eyes fill with tears. Those shimmering sound of the celesta, like bells clear and pure, and we are flung backward. Time is conquered for a brief, luminous moment. Dara remembered one parent telling her that prayers from the Russian funeral mass were hidden in its opening bars. -We don't hear it-, he told her. -But we feel it nonetheless.-”
― Megan Abbott, The Turnout