Alex Ethridge

“That I wouldn’t even let myself imagine receiving as much as I’d hoped for.”
― C.J. Hauser, The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays

“She slowed to pick her way through places where water was seeping up through the mats of dying grass. Rain tapping through the brilliant leaves the only sound. She stopped. The sense of something there, with her, all around her, swirling and seething with energy. How intimately the trees seized the earth. How exquisitely she was included. Patrice closed her eyes and felt a tug. Her spirit poured into the air like song.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman

“The point was that we both understood how easy it is to let your life pass along, totally in book, unless you take a risk, disrupt the expected patterns, and try to make something human happen.”
― C.J. Hauser, The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays

“What I understood on the other side of my decision, on the Gulf, was that there was no such thing as ruining yourself. There are ways to be wounded and ways to survive those wounds but no one can survive denying their own needs. To be a crane wife is unsustainable.”
― C.J. Hauser, The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays