Quotes from Chris Crutcher

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 guy-shot cowboy bleedin' to death.

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.

racist thought and action says far more about the person they come from than the person they are directed at.

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.

But the truth doesn't need to be known, or believed, to be true.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Beware the short terminal guy with nothing to lose.

Nothing exists without its opposite.

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.

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.

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.

Adopted. Big Deal; so was Superman

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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