Rachel Kapelke-Dale > Quotes

“You won’t be able to do this ten years from now—just leave everything behind and go.”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, Graduates in Wonderland: The International Misadventures of Two (Almost) Adults

“I know so much is going to happen here, but I just don't know how. It feels like Paris is full of so many adventures just waiting to be had.”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, Graduates in Wonderland: The International Misadventures of Two (Almost) Adults

“How do we deal with all the people we’ve been? What happens when we have to confront them?”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, Graduates in Wonderland: The International Misadventures of Two (Almost) Adults

“I think no matter where you go, you'll be happy as long as you know why you're there.”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, Graduates in Wonderland: The International Misadventures of Two (Almost) Adults

“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

“Ballerinas are like pointe shoes: you have to break them down before they're of any use.”
― 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

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

“There are so many unknowns right now. Maybe the fortune-teller is rubbing off on me, but I'm starting to think there are no wrong choices in life.”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, Graduates in Wonderland: The International Misadventures of Two (Almost) Adults

“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

“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

“Everywhere people and friendships are changing. I'm starting to wonder how many friends I've made here will still be friends for the long haul. How many places can you leave people behind and still expect to keep in touch with all of them?”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, Graduates in Wonderland: The International Misadventures of Two (Almost) Adults

“I'm realizing that no matter where I go, I'l always be missing someone.”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, Graduates in Wonderland: The International Misadventures of Two (Almost) Adults

“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

“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

“When you're the best at something, your world is small - your life is small.”
― 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

“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

“BUT THOUGH YOU THINK you’ll leave the past in the past, you never do. It drags along behind you, tin cans tied to rope around your ankles, clanking and clattering at the most inopportune moments.”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Fortune Seller

“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

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

[Delphine Léger]”
― 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

“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

“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

“dress yourself in black, black, black.”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Ballerinas

“I just knew I never wanted to live in a world where you weren't my friend.

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

“She's been performing her entire life, I wanted to scream. Why does she have to perform motherhood just to give meaning to yours?”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, Ballerinas

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

“You can love a dog like you loved people when you were a child. Without fear. Only this happens for opposite reasons: as a child, you love without knowledge and thus the threat of death; with a dog, you love despite death's ever-presence. Because each dog (except, perhaps, your last dog) will die before you, you can love them fully and accept their coming death fully, both simultaneously. Not can: have to. The pairing of these truths forces you into the present tense; and so, in the meantime, joy.”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Ingenue

“There's something unnerving about being so close to the life I was living as a seventeen-year-old. Have I changed at all? I remember my own dreamy beliefs about the incredible unknown, but I know the realities of going out into the world by yourself.”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, Graduates in Wonderland: The International Misadventures of Two (Almost) Adults