The Cranes Dance Quotes

“I am here. I am in the present tense. I'm not always here, and sometimes here is a very difficult place. Sometimes it is a labyrinth, or a Minotaur, or a rope I can neither let go of nor follow. It's hard to find the right words, but I guess I would say that it's something like feeling the floor. And that it is my privilege to feel it.”
― Meg Howrey, The Cranes Dance

“When you step from the wings onto the stage you go from total blackness to a blinding hot glare. After a moment you adjust, but there is that moment. like being inside lightning.”
― Meg Howrey, The Cranes Dance

“Sometimes it's just better to suck up the fact that you are an asshole and decide that tomorrow is the day you will start being the person you intend to be.”
― Meg Howrey, The Cranes Dance

“There are things you do when you are a teenager, or a dancer, or just a girl, I guess. You cut your food up in special ways, or you cut yourself, or paper dolls. You pretend that there is an invisible audience watching you all the time, and you do things to impress them or pretend that they didn’t see what you just did because their live video feed was interrupted somehow. You steal things or tell lies or speak to strangers in a Russian accent. You have sex with someone you love, or with someone who gets you really drunk. You lie to your parents, your boyfriend, yourself, your therapist. You cheat on your homework or do other people’s homework for money. You get up, you take class, you rehearse, you perform, you go to bed. How do you decide which of these things are truly crazy and which are just being alive?”
― Meg Howrey, The Cranes Dance

“Keep making noise, I prayed, laughing. Bang drums. Clamor and ring bells for I cannot stand to hear the tired beating of this almost heart.”
― Meg Howrey, The Cranes Dance

“In classical pas de deux, the man controls everything. He picks up the girl. He puts her down. He turns her, takes her weight, stops her, and she must always go where he leads. The woman submits to all this completely. But her submission is not feeble. In fact, the only reason she can submit so utterly is because she is very strong in herself. In her center. She does not collapse, or cave, or stutter-step, or flop. No, she holds herself very consciously, very confidently. She is centered within her own weight. So the man always knows where she is. He can feel her. He can absorb her strength.”
― Meg Howrey, The Cranes Dance

“I realized I still wanted to dream about the person I would become, not actually be her.”
― Meg Howrey, The Cranes Dance

“...needing people and caring about them were two very different things.”
― Meg Howrey, The Cranes Dance

“If only we could crawl inside our dreams and live there. Why can't I live inside my dream?”
― Meg Howrey, The Cranes Dance

“...the overture began. God! Strings! Oboes! Timpani! Are you fucking kidding me? Why, when we know what human beings are capable of doing, do we not turn our collective heads in shame at the sight of rich housewives screaming at each other on television?”
― Meg Howrey, The Cranes Dance

“Abstention, self-control, self-inflicted pain: these are forms of power - about the only kind you can have when you're a fourteen-year-old girl, by the way.”
― Meg Howrey, The Cranes Dance

“I tucked this thought inside me like a fortune into a cookie.”
― Meg Howrey, The Cranes Dance

“I cannot bear this love. Nor the loss of it.”
― Meg Howrey, The Cranes Dance

“But if life is what can be called the time you spend preparing for the event, and then dealing with how the event went, then what would you call the event itself? Is that not life? Is that not the best part?”
― Meg Howrey, The Cranes Dance

“Promise" is a word like any other. Words can go in any direction. It's only the body that is incapable of lying.”
― Meg Howrey, The Cranes Dance

“The love we have is never as desirable as the love we want.”
― Meg Howrey, The Cranes Dance

“I should think people would be disappointed if they watched that kind of movie and then came to see us dance and none of us slit our wrists onstage or made ourselves vomit or got on the backs of motorcycles while wearing tutus and started fucking each other.”
― Meg Howrey, The Cranes Dance

“What I was thinking, in that strange way you can think without words while you are dancing, think in glyphs, think in numbers, was how stupid it is that any of us are here, living. What an absurd game we play with ourselves, as if it mattered. We are all mad, all insane, all deluded. It is all for nothing, really, in the end.”
― Meg Howrey, The Cranes Dance

“And I had forgotten to get more Sweet’N Low, so I had to drink coffee as bitter as I am.”
― Meg Howrey, The Cranes Dance

“This is who she is. She is this movement here, these steps, this turn, this raising of this arm. It's a waste of time to think of oneself in any other terms. For what of us, what of reality, cannot implode, evaporate, contort, evade, disappear? But the body doesn't lie. At a certain point it's impossible to dance loneliness without feeling genuinely lonely.”
― Meg Howrey, The Cranes Dance

“Beautiful gay men are God's gift to women. They're like a consolation prize for ...well, for everything else about being a woman.”
― Meg Howrey, The Cranes Dance

“Sentences are trenches you can take cover in. They are not wildly comfortable. They are not bulletproof. But they can give you the illusion of safety.”
― Meg Howrey, The Cranes Dance

“The world is so utterly, utterly sad that it's useful to have very concrete things to be sad about, from time to time. There, and there, and that thing there. Feel bad about that.”
― Meg Howrey, The Cranes Dance

“You shouldn't ask for forgiveness.
Because if you ask someone to forgive you, and they do, then that's twice that you've taken something from them. First the betrayal, and then the absolution.”
― Meg Howrey, The Cranes Dance

“Talent equaled desirability. Talent trumped good looks or a halfway decent personality. Talent was a personality.”
― Meg Howrey, The Cranes Dance

“Right away we were very good at it, and you like what you are good at, and being better than other people at something is fun. Is that love?”
― Meg Howrey, The Cranes Dance

“Was there a magical love-of-the-dance moment, when the muse Terpsichore called to us and we lifted our arms and spun at one with the divine music of the Universe? I think not. Although pride and obsession can feel like love, I guess.”
― Meg Howrey, The Cranes Dance

“There are Russians, and then there are Russian ballerinas from the Kirov.”
― Meg Howrey, The Cranes Dance

“One hot shower, half a Vicodin, half a plate of chicken curry, and two hits off Roger’s pipe later, I was feeling better.”
― Meg Howrey, The Cranes Dance

“Then I...made a list of ways I am going to be this week. I need to cultivate more perspective. I should spend some enervating moments meditating on the crushing misery of the greater world in general, although perhaps the irrelevance of my sadness is just as sad as anything else.”
― Meg Howrey, The Cranes Dance