Meg Howrey > 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

“Not everything is a test,” she says gently. “Of how much you can stand on your own.”
― Meg Howrey, They're Going to Love You

“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

“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

“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

“Here it comes. Here it is.
A rising, an exaltation.
All this wreckage. All this gorgeous, unrepeatable wreckage. Life.”
― Meg Howrey, They're Going to Love You

“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

“All this wasted time. For nothing. For ego. Because nobody could get exactly what they wanted. Because nobody knew how to stop themselves from being themselves.”
― Meg Howrey, They're Going to Love You

“Having to struggle doesn't necessarily make you interesting. It might just make you tired. I want my work to be seen, to be part of the conversation of my art form, to collaborate with people I admire and respect. But these things are only important. They aren't sacred. The sacred thing is to feel, if only for a moment, that I'm not consuming, or forgetting, or losing the things of this world, but adding to them. That I have made something true, or beautiful, or both. That I might do it again.”
― Meg Howrey, They're Going to Love You

“Everyone I know has someone they love best. I'm no ones best.”
― Meg Howrey, They're Going to Love You

“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 used to joke I'd escaped the curse of the male gaze, because so many men have to physically look up to meet my eyes. But the male gaze is a gods-eye view. Which is to say: omni-present, and internalized. There's still a man in the mirror, watching me look at myself.”
― Meg Howrey, They're Going to Love You

“I tucked this thought inside me like a fortune into a cookie.”
― 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

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

“You know what's more terrible than giving up a dream? To discover you haven't.”
― Meg Howrey, They're Going to Love You

“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

“Everything you say matters," Yoshi's father had once said to him. "Whenever you say something, you are now the person who has said that.”
― Meg Howrey, The Wanderers

“It was that you had to be so careful with grief. Grief sought connections: it stacked, or swarmed. It was only the first time you experienced sorrow that it stood alone, with nothing attached to it.”
― Meg Howrey, The Wanderers

“Good person, bad person. Success, failure. Outside, inside. These are danceable truths. To be flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood. That’s danceable too. But the work of my life has been to ask undanceable questions and find a way to make ballets out of them. There’s nothing to do with this dance but be still.”
― Meg Howrey, They're Going to Love You

“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

“Isabel's relations with her mother and sister were like those knots you get in necklaces. You try to tease them out and end up putting the chain back in the jewelry box.”
― Meg Howrey, They're Going to Love You

“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

“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

“She feels a little sad. Is she sad? Helen considers an alternative: She is dehydrated.”
― Meg Howrey, The Wanderers