The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays
C.J. Hauser
Top 10 Best Quotes
“I need you to know: I hated that I needed more than this from him. There is nothing more humiliating to me than my own desires. Nothing that makes me hate myself more than being burdensome and less than self-sufficient. I did not want to feel like the kind of nagging woman who might exist in a sit-com.”
“People know how it goes. It’s harder to tell the story of how I convinced myself I didn’t need what was necessary to survive. How I convinced myself it was my lack of needs that made me worthy of love.”
“There are worse things than not receiving love. There are sadder stories than this. There are species going extinct, and a planet warming. I told myself: Who are you to complain, you with these frivolous extracurricular needs?”
“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.”
“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.”
“We cruised past small islands, families of pink roseate spoonbills, garbage tankers swarmed by seagulls, blowing fields of grass and wolfberries, and I realized it was not that remarkable for a person to understand what another person needed.”
“For years, I have convinced myself that love is meant to be an act of extreme and transformative caretaking. And so I’ve been more savior than partner. More robot than girl. More nurse than lover.”
“This wasn’t what I hoped he would say. But it was what was being offered. And who was I to want more?”
“That I wouldn’t even let myself imagine receiving as much as I’d hoped for.”
“It’s harder to tell the story of how I convinced myself I didn’t need what was necessary to survive. How I convinced myself it was my lack of needs that made me worthy of love. After cocktail hour one night, in the cabin kitchen, I told Lindsay about how I’d blown up my life.”
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Book Keywords:
love, loneliness, humiliation, womanhood, burden, desire
