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

  216 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “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

  113 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “But the truth doesn't need to be known, or believed, to be true.”

  Chris Crutcher

  89 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “...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

  60 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “...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

  51 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “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

  45 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “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

  44 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

• “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

  43 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “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

  34 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “Beware the short terminal guy with nothing to lose.”

  Chris Crutcher

  34 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “Nothing exists without its opposite.”

  Chris Crutcher

  33 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “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

  27 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “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

  25 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “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

  22 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “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

  21 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “Adopted.
  Big Deal; so was Superman”

  Chris Crutcher

  20 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “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

  18 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “I'd rather be a flash than a slowly burning ember.”

  Chris Crutcher

  18 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “Once a thing is known,it can't be UNknown.”

  Chris Crutcher

  16 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “And I think if you're going to be with somebody, you owe it to them to show yourself.”

  Chris Crutcher

  16 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “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

  16 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

• “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

  16 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “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

  15 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “You have to be mad in the language you're mad in.”

  Chris Crutcher

  15 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “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

  15 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement