Chris Crutcher > Quotes

“...racist thought and action says far more about the person they come from than the person they are directed at.”
― Chris Crutcher, Whale Talk

“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, Deadline

“But the truth doesn't need to be known, or believed, to be true.”
― Chris Crutcher, Deadline

“...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, Deadline

“...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

“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, Deadline

“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, Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes

“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, Whale Talk

“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, Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes

“Beware the short terminal guy with nothing to lose.”
― Chris Crutcher, Deadline

“Nothing exists without its opposite.”
― Chris Crutcher, Whale Talk

“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, Stotan!

“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, Deadline

“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, King of the Mild Frontier: An Ill-Advised Autobiography – The Riveting, Laugh-Out-Loud Funny Young Adult Coming-of-Age Memoir

“Adopted.
Big Deal; so was Superman”
― Chris Crutcher, Whale Talk

“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, Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes

“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.”
― Chris Crutcher, Deadline

“I'd rather be a flash than a slowly burning ember.”
― Chris Crutcher, Deadline

“Once a thing is known,it can't be UNknown.”
― Chris Crutcher, Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes

“ And I think if you're going to be with somebody, you owe it to them to show yourself. ”
― Chris Crutcher, Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes

“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, Whale Talk

“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, King of the Mild Frontier: An Ill-Advised Autobiography – The Riveting, Laugh-Out-Loud Funny Young Adult Coming-of-Age Memoir

“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, Deadline

“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, Deadline

“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. It's like playing ball in some way. There are guys on the team, like Cody, I'd give my life for. But you have to be willing to lay down your life for all of them if you want to put the best you on the field. Every guy on that field has to believe you'll bring nothing back off the field with you.”
― Chris Crutcher

“You have to be mad in the language you're mad in.”
― Chris Crutcher, Angry Management

“If you think your life sucks, it probably does. Do something about it.”
― Chris Crutcher, Angry Management

“...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, Whale Talk

“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

“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