Crutcher Quotes & Sayings

Leave me alone, you big fat shitburger! — Chris Crutcher

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

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

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. — Chris Crutcher

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

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. — Chris Crutcher

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. — Chris Crutcher

You have to be mad in the language you're mad in. — Chris Crutcher

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. — Chris Crutcher

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

Taking on someone else's monsters will kill you. He — Chris Crutcher

Nothing about life is sacred until we make it so. — Chris Crutcher

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

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

I believe there is important shit to be dealt with. — Chris Crutcher

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

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

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

I'd rather be a flash than a slowly burning ember. — Chris Crutcher

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

'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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remember the first time your dad tried to teach you to drive on ice? How when the car started to slide you had to turn into the side while every nerve in your body said to turn the other way? I think life is like that a lot, way more than we know. And I think love is particularly like that. We think we're supposed to fight for it when we're really supposed to let go; you know, turn into it. — Chris Crutcher

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

The World is full of fools and crackpots - people who were never given tools to fill their lives up with, and consequently have made their lives so meaningless the only way they can feel good about themselves is to look around and see who they're better than. When they can't find someone, they create someone. Their ideas are meaningless- right up until we start to fight against them. We're the ones who give power to the bigots. We make their ideas real by opposing them. — Chris Crutcher

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

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

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

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. — Chris Crutcher

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

I love Chris Crutcher, Sara Zarr, Lois Lowry, Elizabeth Scott, Madeleine L'Engle, Gordon Korman, Michelle Magorian, Heather Bouwman. — Lisa McMann

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

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

'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

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

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

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

Tomorrow is promised to no one so live your life fully everyday. — Therese Crutcher-Marin

Comedy is tragedy standing on its head with its pants down. — Chris Crutcher

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. — Chris Crutcher

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

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. — Chris Crutcher

Beware the short terminal guy with nothing to lose. — Chris Crutcher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Chris Crutcher

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

I walk outside and scream at the top of my lungs, and it maybe travels two blocks. A whale unleashes his cry, and it travels hundreds or even thousands of miles. Every whale in the ocean will at one time or another run into that song. And I figure whales probably don't edit. If they think it, they say it ... Whale talk is the truth, and in a very short period of time, if you're a whale, you know exactly what it is to be you. — Chris Crutcher

Nothing exists without its opposite. — Chris Crutcher

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

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

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. — Chris Crutcher

Adopted.
Big Deal; so was Superman — Chris Crutcher

I don't know why I always felt the need to educate my friends when I learned some new bit of information most of the rest of the world didn't know, such as the secret existence of Jesus' older, smarter brother, or, later, that you could crawl into our coal furnace and freeze or that the water coming out of our C tap was actually warm. But I did, and ended up on the wooden bench outside Mr. Mautz's Sunday school classroom the very next Sunday for what would become the first in a long string of blasphemous statements. — Chris Crutcher

I'm sorry. I can't do this. I thought I could but I can't. My favorite professor at the university said he gets his piece of therapeutic information every time he boards an airplane. The flight attendant says if the oxygen mask drops down, be sure to put on your own before helping anyone with theirs. I'm afraid I haven't put mine on. — Chris Crutcher

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

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

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

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

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

From a distance,' he says, 'my car looks just like every other car on the freeway, and Sarah Byrnes looks just like the rest of us. And if she's going to get help, she'll get it from herself or she'll get it from us. Let me tell you why I brought this up. Because the other day when I saw how hard it was for Mobe to go to the hospital to see her, I was embarrassed that I didn't know her better, that I ever laughed at one joke about her. I was embarrassed that I let some kid go to school with me for twelve years and turned my back on pain that must be unbearable. I was embarrassed that I haven't found a way to include her somehow the way Mobe has.'
Jesus. I feel tears welling up, and I see them running down Ellerby's cheeks. Lemry better get a handle on this class before it turns into some kind of therapy group.
So,' Lemry says quietly, 'your subject will be the juxtaposition of man and God in the universe?'
Ellerby shakes his head. 'My subject will be shame. — Chris Crutcher

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

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

Hey, cowboy, what's happening? — Chris Crutcher

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

Then hearing Elvis today made me think I didn't have a lot to bitch about, but when I said that to Mr. Nak after group, he said, Don't get to thinkin' just because some other guy's sinkin' in horse manure, the stuff up around your neck is chocolate puddin'. A wound is a wound, young Brewster. Remember that. Don't diminish the pain of your own just because you see some other gut-shot cowboy bleedin' to death. — Chris Crutcher

Athletics carries its own set of truths, and those truths are diminished when manipulated by people with agendas. — Chris Crutcher

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

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

The only truly ruined people are those who believe they are. — Chris Crutcher

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Chris Crutcher

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

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

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

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

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. — Chris Crutcher

The numbers in Ohio as well as the rest of the nation make it clear that the African-American communities have been targeted and logic makes it clear that this did not happen coincidentally or unintentionally. — Mark Crutcher

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. — Chris Crutcher

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

You know, Bo, there is a feeling, in that instant following some life-changing tragedy, that you can actually step back over that sliver of time and stop the horror from coming. But that feeling is a lie, because in the tiniest microminisecond after any event occurs, it is as safe in history as Julius Caesar. Data in the universal computer is backed up as it happens. — Chris Crutcher

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

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

The kind of man who can be pro-choice about your baby could also be pro-choice about you. — Mark Crutcher

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

A sport has its own built-in integrity - doesn't need an artificial one. — Chris Crutcher

You have to be careful not to use anything too colloquial or you date the book. — Chris Crutcher