Quotes from 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.

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....

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

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.

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.

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.

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!)

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Leave me alone, you big fat shitburger!

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

that's where God watches us from: from a distance.

The first time I heard the saying 'Live every day like you are going to live forever and every day like is your last.' I thought it was one of those unsolvable story problems from my fifth grade arithmetic books, but it turned out to be the truest thing about my year.

I think most of us tell ourselves we don't want what we think we can't have just to make life bearable.

If humans are ever to understand one another, they will have to come to terms with the concept, and the reality, of relativity. In essence, that's what the Earthgame is about. They will have to see how things look compared to other things. Once you understand that nothing exists without its opposite, you understand nothing is good and nothing is evil, that opposites actually hold each other up.