Cris Beam > Quotes

“People will see whatever they want to see. Parallax.”
― Cris Beam, I am J

“I guess it's about what you have to give up to gain something else...Did you always have to give something up for a gain?”
― Cris Beam, I am J

“Art is the lie that tells the truth”
― Cris Beam, I am J

“Inside, a piece of him cracked; it was as though an emotion that had calcified into bone got tapped with a tiny hammer and splintered straight through.”
― cris beam, I am J

“I feel like I'm taking beefcake shots for a calender," J said.

"Yeah there's a huge market for topless tranny academics. Right up there with the firemen.”
― Cris Beam, I am J

“A child abuse investigator can enter anyone’s home at any time without a warrant. Usually,”
― Cris Beam, To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care

“Just as it was in Kempe’s time, the rate of removals today has less to do with the literal rate of physical abuse or neglect and more to do with a fickle public intermittently enraged by what they hear on the news. When kids die at the hands of their parents, headlines put child protection agencies under intense and sudden scrutiny. Investigators increase their removals, hoping to avoid another high-profile fatality.”
― Cris Beam, To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care

“Still, Allen and the Greens are an example of foster care working exactly as it should: a foster home is meant to be only a temporary holding place while parents get the support they need to get back to being parents again. The foster family should provide the kind of bonding and love that the Greens gave Allen and then, wrenching as it is, let the child go. The biological parents may be imperfect—they may feed the kids inappropriate foods or leave the TV on too long—but as long as there’s no abuse, a child belongs with his blood.”
― Cris Beam, To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care

“But I’ve struggled, like every foster child I’ve ever met, between two opposing agonies: she didn’t want me, and I’m the one who left. The guilt, still, is immeasurable.”
― Cris Beam, To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care

“It’s not unusual, while waiting for somebody to kiss the frog and the real parents to come home, for a foster child to live in ten or twenty different houses.”
― Cris Beam, To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care

“There are so many crises in foster care—the original abuse, the shock and alarm when a child is removed, the courtroom fights, kids rebelling, bio parents panicking, foster parents molesting, relapses, rehabs, reabuse—that basic, low-level functioning begins to seem exemplary. These are the mediocre flatlands of child welfare, where if it’s not a crisis it’s not a problem.”
― Cris Beam, To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care

“Still, Allen and the Greens are an example of foster care working exactly as it should: a foster home is meant to be only a temporary holding place while parents get the support they need to get back to being parents again. The foster family should provide the kind of bonding and love that the Greens gave Allen and then, wrenching as it is, let the child go. The biological parents may be imperfect—they may feed the kids inappropriate foods or leave the TV on too long—but as long as there’s no abuse, a child belongs with his blood. It’s not the state’s role to interfere with the way we raise our kids.”
― Cris Beam, To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care

“If you have the choice of being abused by your mother or abused by a stranger, you’d choose your mother. It’s abuse either way.” This came from Arelis Rosario-Keane, a twenty-two-year-old college student and a veteran of the foster care system, referring to the likelihood of getting mistreated in care.”
― Cris Beam, To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care

“A review in the Journal of the American Medical Association of thirty-six studies that looked at the physical growth, cognition, language and motor skills, behavior, attention, affect, and neurophysiology found no connection between prenatal exposure to cocaine and a decrease in functioning.”
― Cris Beam

“It’s not that the government made us do it; you can’t think that way,” John said. “They made us not ask questions, they told us what to think, but also, we did it.”
― Cris Beam, I Feel You: The Surprising Power of Extreme Empathy

“They’d never know how confusion and cruelty change people, make them hard—the way the deepest cuts make the toughest scabs.”
― Cris Beam, I Am J: A Novel