Top 96 Chris Crutcher Quotes
#1. You have to be careful not to use anything too colloquial or you date the book.
Chris Crutcher
#2. A student asked me recently why somebody always dies in my books. I said, because somebody is always dying in my life.
Chris Crutcher
#3. 'Whale Talk' is a tough book, but it is also a compassionate book about telling the truth and about redemption. I didn't draw the tough parts out of thin air; they are stories handed to me by people in pain.
Chris Crutcher
#4. Athletics carries its own set of truths, and those truths are diminished when manipulated by people with agendas.
Chris Crutcher
#5. Beware the short terminal guy with nothing to lose.
Chris Crutcher
#6. My first book, 'Running Loose', was censored back in 1983 or '84. Every book I've written since has been censored somewhere.
Chris Crutcher
#7. When you're watching somebody read your material and they smile and nod, you know you've found that place where your experience and their experience match, even though they aren't the same exact experience.
Chris Crutcher
#8. 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.
Chris Crutcher
#10. 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?
Chris Crutcher
#11. 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.
Chris Crutcher
#12. 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.
Chris Crutcher
#13. 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.
Chris Crutcher
#14. 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.
Chris Crutcher
#15. It's a scary thing; moving on. Part of me wishes life were more predictable and part of me is excited that it's not. I think it's impossible to tell the good things from the bad things while they're happening.
Chris Crutcher
#16. 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.
Chris Crutcher
#17. 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.
Chris Crutcher
#18. Love, in the universal sense, is unconditional acceptance. In the individual sense, the one-on-one sense, try this: we can say we love each other if my life is better because you're in it and your life is better because I'm in it. The intensity of the love is weighted by how much better.
Chris Crutcher
#19. My years as a therapist working with abuse and neglect families taught me at least one important lesson for my own life. Never judge until you can see through the eyes of that person you are judging, and then ... never judge.
Chris Crutcher
#20. Talking with Elaine like that, with no judgment from her or anything, seemed to bring my feelings more to the surface so I could look at them. I love times like that; you don't get many of them.
(Walker, in STOTAN!)
Chris Crutcher
#21. It's hard to imagine my life not writing. I love it.
Chris Crutcher
#22. My early life had a lot to do with my origins as a writer, but I didn't get into doing any writing at all until I was about 35 years old.
Chris Crutcher
#23. We can say we love each other if my life is better because you're in it and your life is better because I'm in it.
Chris Crutcher
#24. Taking on someone else's monsters will kill you. He
Chris Crutcher
#25. What I hope we can learn is to be aware of how our beliefs color what we see. I wanted to tell Brittain that Lemry was trying
Chris Crutcher
#26. But the truth doesn't need to be known, or believed, to be true.
Chris Crutcher
#27. 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.
Chris Crutcher
#28. Then he said if I ever want to see how something works, just look at it broken.
Chris Crutcher
#29. Racist thought and action says far more about the person they come from than the person they are directed at.
Chris Crutcher
#30. 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
Chris Crutcher
#31. If you've seen 'Friday Night Lights' - that was just like my town.
Chris Crutcher
#32. The premise of 'Deadline' forced me to go against my own grain with a character determined to find all that is valuable in that time. I believe this is a story about redemption; how, even with the best intentions, it's sometimes found and sometimes not.
Chris Crutcher
#33. 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
Chris Crutcher
#34. I think when you're dying you start looking for important things in the corners. You can't let anything that seems even semi-important pass, because it passes forever. Things take on meaning.
Chris Crutcher
#35. 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.
Chris Crutcher
#36. 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.
Chris Crutcher
#37. 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.
Chris Crutcher
#38. Sometimes I wish I could have religion their way. You know, no responsibilities in life but to cut down people who don't think the way you do.
Chris Crutcher
#39. 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.
Chris Crutcher
#40. 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.
Chris Crutcher
#41. Any writer my age almost can't get away from being influenced by Kurt Vonnegut, partially because of his simple, clear way of stating things. To read Vonnegut is to learn how to use economy words.
Chris Crutcher
#42. 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.
Chris Crutcher
#43. 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.
Chris Crutcher
#44. There's only one thing to say to the censors: Shut up.
Chris Crutcher
#45. I have no personal agenda in whether or not a library keeps 'Whale Talk' or 'Athletic Shorts' or any of my books shelved.
Chris Crutcher
#46. If you think your life sucks, it probably does. Do something about it.
Chris Crutcher
#47. It seems to me if you don't know anything about child development you shouldn't intimate in your 'reporting' that you do.
Chris Crutcher
#48. 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.
Chris Crutcher
#49. 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.
Chris Crutcher
#50. 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.
Chris Crutcher
#51. I'd rather be a flash than a slowly burning ember.
Chris Crutcher
#52. 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.
Chris Crutcher
#53. 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.
Chris Crutcher
#56. There isn't an entity in the universe that does not know about love.
Chris Crutcher
#57. 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.
Chris Crutcher
#58. 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.
Chris Crutcher
#59. The value of a story like 'Deadline' is kids get to look at death at the perfect distance. They can put the book down. They can experience the story, rub up against it, but it's not real life.
Chris Crutcher
#60. The only truly ruined people are those who believe they are.
Chris Crutcher
#61. I think most of us tell ourselves we don't want what we think we can't have just to make life bearable.
Chris Crutcher
#62. 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.
Chris Crutcher
#63. 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.
Chris Crutcher
#64. Sarah Byrnes was home with Lemery and safe from her father. I knew i didnt have to protect her anymore now that she is with someone I trust.
Chris Crutcher
#65. I love Chris Crutcher, Sara Zarr, Lois Lowry, Elizabeth Scott, Madeleine L'Engle, Gordon Korman, Michelle Magorian, Heather Bouwman.
Lisa McMann
#66. I am for anything that makes teens visible in an honest way ... in other words, anything that represents them the way they are, positively or negatively.
Chris Crutcher
#68. 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.
Chris Crutcher
#69. I believe there is important shit to be dealt with.
Chris Crutcher
#70. 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.
Chris Crutcher
#71. He knew that we take what the universe gives us, and we either get the most out of it or we don't, but in the end we all go out the same way.
Chris Crutcher
#72. Certainly working with teens keeps me up to date with language and with certain kinds of thinking.
Chris Crutcher
#73. When I turned 50, I realized I was now going to start counting backwards in terms of the years I had left. Then I turned 60, and I just stopped counting. I don't have a fear of death, but I have an awareness that there's a time limit.
Chris Crutcher
#74. The kids you turn your backs on when you take away their stories are the ones who lose, as well as you as a community of adults who may appear to fear their truths.
Chris Crutcher
#75. 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.
Chris Crutcher
#76. 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.
Chris Crutcher
#78. 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.
Chris Crutcher
#79. 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 ...
Chris Crutcher
#80. 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.
Chris Crutcher
#82. Comedy is tragedy standing on its head with its pants down.
Chris Crutcher
#83. 'Deadline' is the story of a young man forced to discover who he is, and what's important in life, during the short span of his senior year in high school.
Chris Crutcher
#84. 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.
Chris Crutcher
#85. A sport has its own built-in integrity - doesn't need an artificial one.
Chris Crutcher
#86. He doesn't believe butt time on planet Earth doesn't neccessarily makes you wise.
Chris Crutcher
#87. It wasn't a very Christian thing to do, that's all.
Chris Crutcher
#88. That's where God watches us from: from a distance.
Chris Crutcher
#89. And I think if you're going to be with somebody, you owe it to them to show yourself.
Chris Crutcher
#90. 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,
Chris Crutcher
#91. I can't think of a subject that is taboo for me, unless it's one I simply don't know anything about.
Chris Crutcher
#92. Man with Brain the Size of Tic Tac Mates with Amoeba Couple gives birth to giant adjusto; names him Dale
Chris Crutcher
#93. If you were to look at each atom as a universe unto itself, think of the number of universes within each of us;at the same time, look at any one of us in the vast space I am seeing out the window of this bus, which is a molecule on a cell on a flea on a hair on a wart of the known universe.
Chris Crutcher
#95. I have made a career of creating characters who fight school authority and chomp at the bit to get out into the 'real' world and live their lives, mostly because that's the kind of teenager I was.
Chris Crutcher
#96. I was pretty anti-academic, and I wasn't much of a student. I had a really short attention span and did not get a lot out of high school academically. I think college was a little the same way.
Chris Crutcher
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