Chris Crutcher Quotes

See, Mr. Nak'll be talking about how anger comes creeping up, hoping you're not paying attention so it can trick you into something really embarrassing or degrading, and before you know it he's got you thinking about your life, or worse, talking about it. He keeps asking what seem like harmless questions, and it almost seems safe to answer them. Next thing you know you're ready to say something you thought you'd never tell anybody.

Experience is the only teacher," Hey-Soos says. "Even if I could have told you, it would have been a lecture. Why do you think kids don't listen to their parents, or people don't leave churches and do what the preacher tells them?

Then he said if I ever want to see how something works, just look at it broken.

I believe there is important shit to be dealt with.

If I have any complaints about my youth ... one is that many well-meaning adults lied to me. Not spiteful lies with malicious intent but lies designed to prevent emotional and psychological pain - lies told by the people who cared about me most: my parents, teachers, relatives.

If we are to stop bullying in schools, we have to start with teachers and administrators. If we want to stop it, we have to stop it.

I can't think of a subject that is taboo for me, unless it's one I simply don't know anything about.

I believe there was a big bang and that because of that we are all connected into infinity, and I know very little having to do with human beings that doesn't also have to do with connection.

It wasn't a very Christian thing to do, that's all.

I know the answer to the question now, by the way: why bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. It came from my inner editor, the part of me that forces the wordy writer in me to dump ninety percent of all modifiers: Ask both questions again, minus the adjectives.
"Why do things happen to people?"
Just because.

The frustration for a parent is that you might be available all the time, but the kid may approach you only about 10% of the time.

He doesn't believe butt time on planet Earth doesn't neccessarily makes you wise.

Mr. Nak taught me a trick. He told me to think of fear as a person who's going to be around whether he's invited or not. He said, Think of him like a big ol' bully pain-in-the-butt cousin you cain't get rid of, an' the only way to get your binniss done is to allow him to tag along, because he's goin' to anyway. Then don't take your eye off him a minute, so he don't get the chance to make you look like a horse's patoot.

So you didn't tell me it was a messed-up idea to keep this all a secret because ... "
"Because experience is the only teacher," Hey-Soos says. "Even if I could have told you, it would have been a lecture. Why do you think kids don't listen to their parents, or people don't leave churches and do what the preacher tells them? There's only one thing that's universal."
"What's that?"
"The truth.

As much as we'd like to think life is sacred, there's not a lot of evidence for that. The universe is maddeningly casual, giving and taking it.

In 2004, one of my books, 'Whale Talk,' was chosen as an all-school read in Fowlerville, Michigan, a rural town not far from Detroit. They had done what I thought was a brilliant and innovative thing: decided to teach the book in every discipline, sophomores through seniors.

I figure if those things were in God's jurisdiction, he'd do something different about them. But they aren't. Those are in our jurisdiction.

Sometimes a book is better than it ever had a right to be because of the history the reader brings to the reading and because of the methods educators use to bring a particular story alive.

If you've seen 'Friday Night Lights' - that was just like my town.

He goes for people's open wounds, then brings God in with air support. You have to agree, there's a certain cowardice to that approach.

If we're going to make a real dent in the bullying issue, we're going to have to address the bullies themselves: find ways to help empower them that don't include allowing them to be predators or to simply be punished.

It's easy to look back and say if things had been perfect, I could have accommodated all of those things into my life. But as a therapist I do not allow that word to be uttered in my office after the first session, because I believe the only reason for the existence of that word is to make us feel bad. It's the only word in the language (that I know of) that is defined in common usage by what can't be. It sets a vague standard that can't be met because it is never truly characterized. I prefer to think that we're all out here doing our best under the circumstances, looking at our world through the only eyes through which we can look at it: our own.

Once a thing is known,it can't be UNknown.

Well, let me make something perfectly clear (as Richard Nixon says on those old news clips about the Watergate scandal, right before he's about to fill the room with fog)I am not immortal. I've spent more than ten hours in the psych ward with Sarah Byrnes
really and truly the toughest person in our solar system
and I'll tell you what, if life can shoot Sarah Byrnes ot of the sky, it can nail me blindfolded.

The longer I wait the more reasons I can think of why it means something other than what I thought it meant when I first read it.

I want to look at this character from all points of view. I know I don't want to make them all good or all bad or all anything ... the story itself often helps create the character.

What I hope my writing reflects ... is a sense of the connections between all human beings ... and a different perspective on the true nature of courage. For me, those are things worth exploring and writing about.

As a child abuse and neglect therapist I do battle daily with Christians enamored of the Old Testament phrase "Spare the rod and spoil the child." No matter how far I stretch my imagination, it does not stretch far enough to include the image of a cool dude like Jesus taking a rod to a kid.

You have to see everyone in relationship to you. Just because you understand the shit in someone else's life doesn't mean you don't stand up for your own

You don't always get what you expect. I wish someone, sometime when I was growing up, would have told me what expectations would get me ...
Our parents, schools, everyone tells us things will be a certain way when we're adults and if they're not that way, we should make them be; or at least pretend. But after a certain point that just doesn't work.

It's hard to imagine my life not writing. I love it.

Something about the joy and pain of that moment, something about the excruciating contrast, made me feel that no matter what happens now, my life has been worth it. What a ride.

I figure if Doc is right about the time I have left,I should wrap up my adolescence in the next few days, get into my early productive stages about the third week of school, go through my midlife crisis during Martin Luther King Jr's birthday, redouble my efforts at productivity and think about my legacy, say, Easter, and start cashing in my 401(k)s a couple weeks before Memorial Day.

These kids up here, they act like the toughest kids in in the world, just like me, but this is the first time I've ever seen under that toughness
in anybody else or in me. I'm really scared, because if I'm going to have a life, I'm going to have to act different, and I don't know if I can.

A student asked me recently why somebody always dies in my books. I said, because somebody is always dying in my life.

Beware the short terminal guy with nothing to lose.

Lion emits a low whistle as he spots Bo entering his fifth-period Journalism class. 'What happened to your face?'
Bo touches it tenderly and smiles. 'Nothing ...
'This wasn't your Dad.'
Bo smiles again. 'No. My dad leaves bruises on the inside.

My first book, 'Running Loose', was censored back in 1983 or '84. Every book I've written since has been censored somewhere.

Adopted.
Big Deal; so was Superman

By the time a kid goes to college, if he's taking math or science, at least he knows, or you hope he knows, some basics. But if you're teaching history in college, you have a lot of damage to undo. You basically have to start over because so much of what a kid has already learned is just wrong.

We get crazy when we can't make things be like the world tells us they are". She looked back out the window. "It was that way for me and your brother, I think. I mean, how could I have loved him that last year? I didn't even know who he was. He was way more attracted to drugs and bikers and that whole lifestyle than he was to me. But somebody told me that if you really loved somebody,you stayed with him no matter what. You had to fight for him." She laughe. "Hell, I was convinced.

There isn't an entity in the universe that does not know about love.

Racist thought and action says far more about the person they come from than the person they are directed at.

It seems to me if you don't know anything about child development you shouldn't intimate in your 'reporting' that you do.

A man described by authorities as one evolutionary step above a banana slug has recently admitted to having been locked in the Sacajawea Junior High biology lab over a long weekend nearly sixteen years ago when he fell asleep and was mistaken as a cadaver. Though the man is incapable of human speech, he was able, over a period of weeks, to chisel out his story in hieroglyphics on the bathroom wall of the insane asylum where he now resides. He claims that toward the end of the second day of his accidental captivity, he got downright lonely and sought companionship at his own intellectual level. He found that companionship in a petri dish.

That's where God watches us from: from a distance.

Tonight sometime the full reality will dawn on him, but he's like me: the guy you want at the site where the plane went down.

The Magnificent Seven consisted of one swimmer of color, a representative from each extreme of the educational spectrum, a muscle man, a giant, a chameleon, and a one-legged psychopath. When I envision us walking seven abreast through the halls of Cutter High, decked out in the sacred blue and gold, my heart swells.

I think the value in books like mine, and a great number by other talented writers, is in the ability to bring dark subjects into the open where they are not so dark, where they can be talked about and considered by teens and adults alike.

She's been around all my life and I've done nothing; stayed as far from her as I could because I don't like thinking about her pain. But that's chicken shit, because once a thing is known, it can't be unknown. He sits back and folds his hands

Like I said before, Rudy says, it's all about differences. Something about humans really doesn't like them, when they are the very thing we should embrace. If someone's different from you and it scares you or makes you mad, that's God telling you to take a closer look. If you're scared or mad, that's about you, not about the person who scares or angers you.

I don't think I'll ever lose the feeling that I had when I read 'To Kill a Mockingbird' - Harper Lee was going back into her childhood. I grew up in a real small town - Lee's was in the South, mine the Northwest - but small towns have a lot in common. There was such a revelation in knowing that a story could be told like that.

He tries to force the anger down, but it's like an anvil on his chest. He closes his eyes, like Sammy taught him, and forces the anvil up; he softens.

Viruses have no morality, no sense of good and evil, the deserving or the undeserving ... AIDS is not the swift sword with which the Lord punishes the evil practitioners of male homosexuality and intravenous drug use. It is simply an opportunistic virus that does what it has to do to stay alive.

The distances across that atom, in relative measure, are the same as the distances across the universe. So there is no big and no little and I'm left to realize that the pain I feel, relative to me, is as big as two galaxies moving apart in the universe,

Since then I have searched for my heroes among small-t truths. I always find them among people learning the art of acceptance: not acceptance of defeat or acceptance of some inability to influence their own futures, but rather acceptance of life on the planet, acceptance of the grays rather than the black-and-whites, acceptance of the astonishing range of human emotion and human behavior.

If someone's different from you and it scares you or makes you mad, that's God telling you to take a closer look. If you're scared or mad, that's about you, not about the person who scares you or angers you.

Does anyone in this room have it?"
"No, Chris, no one here has it."
"How do you know?"
"Because the mark was dark skin. Negroes are the descendants of Cain."
I didn't have my civil-rights sensibilities yet, but I was starting to get a bad feeling about God ...

If you're writing about angry people, you use the language of anger. If you're writing about desperate people, you use the language of desperation.

Man with Brain the Size of Tic Tac Mates with Amoeba Couple gives birth to giant adjusto; names him Dale

You can't judge Islam by those people any more than you can judge Christians by abortion clinic bombers or white separatists. Love turn to hate at the fringes of any belief system.

There's only one thing to say to the censors: Shut up.

Nothing exists without its opposite.

No amount of effort could have stopped that, because our points of view - the way we perceive things - are inextricably linked to our beliefs, ... ,our beliefs color what we see.

Dillon, all you have in this world, really, are your responses to it. Responses to your feelings and responses to what comes in from outside. You know how adults are always trying to get you to take responsibility? That's all responsibility is, responding to the world, owning your responses. It isn't about taking blame or finding out if something's your fault.

The only truly ruined people are those who believe they are.

There is no Jesus without Judas, no Martin Luther King, Jr., without the Klan; no Ali without Joe Frazier; no freedom without tyranny. No wisdom exists that does not include perspective. Relativity is the greatest gift.

It reminded me of second grade when our teacher said each of us had a skeleton inside us; you know, to hold up your body. I'd been watching some horror flick with witches and werewolves and skeletons and stuff, and it absolutely terrorized me, Lar, because I couldn't figure out how I was going to get away from a monster that lived inside me. But Mr. Nak kept at it. So you have the answer. It ain't about Redmond, it's about you. When you come face-to-face with this here Jesse James of a football coach, you tell your pain-in-the-butt cousin, Fear, he can come along if he wants to, but you're gonna take care of binniss once an' for all, no matter what he does or says, because you're by God fed up with gettin' jerked around. His presence ain't gonna change your actions one whit.

Comedy is tragedy standing on its head with its pants down.

144461I know very little having to do with human beings that doesn't also have to do with connection. We want to be noticed, we want to be good enough, we want friends, and we want to be loved. We want our place to stand.

When you're different, on the down side, you learn to live from one scarce rich moment to the next, no matter the distance between.

If you think your life sucks, it probably does. Do something about it.

You put yourself out there in the truest way you can and hope others do the same. You'll connect or you won't, but you did what you could.

Censors can make a case for zero tolerance in language. They can make the argument that since we don't allow our children to use that language in schools, we also shouldn't give them stories in which it is used.

And I think if you're going to be with somebody, you owe it to them to show yourself.

The first time I heard the saying 'Live every day like you are going to live forever and every day like is your last.' I thought it was one of those unsolvable story problems from my fifth grade arithmetic books, but it turned out to be the truest thing about my year.

Hey, cowboy, what's happening?

Certainly working with teens keeps me up to date with language and with certain kinds of thinking.

Leave me alone, you big fat shitburger!

Being an outsider means not being heard, not having a voice. It means being treated as a second-class citizen, being diminished in the eyes of others. We have all felt this way at one time or another, but some feel it more consistently. Unfortunately, our schools often do not embrace the talents of many of their occupants.