Top 40 Chris Crutcher Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “If you think your life sucks, it probably does. Do something about it.”

— Chris Crutcher

2. “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

3. “Sometimes a book is better than it ever had a right to be because of the history the reader brings to the reading and because of the methods educators use to bring a particular story alive.”

— Chris Crutcher

Featured in: Reading Quotes, Quotes About Stories

4. “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

5. “Nothing exists without its opposite.”

— Chris Crutcher

6. “Beware the short terminal guy with nothing to lose.”

— Chris Crutcher

7. “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.”

— Chris Crutcher

8. “Taking on someone else’s monsters will kill you.” He.”

— Chris Crutcher

9. “I’d rather be a flash than a slowly burning ember.”

— Chris Crutcher

10. “Adopted. Big Deal; so was Superman.”

— Chris Crutcher

11. “The premise of ‘Deadline’ forced me to go against my own grain with a character determined to find all that is valuable in that time. I believe this is a story about redemption; how, even with the best intentions, it’s sometimes found and sometimes not.”

— Chris Crutcher

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

12. “But the truth doesn’t need to be known, or believed, to be true.”

— Chris Crutcher

13. “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

14. “Man with Brain the Size of Tic Tac Mates with Amoeba Couple gives birth to giant adjusto; names him Dale.”

— Chris Crutcher

15. “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

16. “And I think if you’re going to be with somebody, you owe it to them to show yourself.”

— Chris Crutcher

17. “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.”

— Chris Crutcher

18. “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

19. “Darlin’,” he says, draining his coffee cup, “I can come up with solutions all day long and you can come up with reasons. Either you take control or all you’ve got left is reasons.”

— Chris Crutcher

20. “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

21. “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

22. “You have to be careful not to use anything too colloquial or you date the book.”

— Chris Crutcher

23. “A sport has its own built-in integrity, doesn’t need an artificial one. Athletics carries its own set of truths, and those truths are diminished and manipulated by people with agendas.”

— Chris Crutcher

24. “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.”

— Chris Crutcher

25. “What I hope we can learn is to be aware of how our beliefs color what we see.” I wanted to tell Brittain that Lemry was trying.”

— Chris Crutcher

26. “I have made a career of creating characters who fight school authority and chomp at the bit to get out into the ‘real’ world and live their lives, mostly because that’s the kind of teenager I was.”

— Chris Crutcher

27. “There is no Jesus without Judas, no Martin Luther King, Jr., without the Klan; no Ali without Joe Frazier; no freedom without tyranny. No wisdom exists that does not include perspective. Relativity is the greatest gift.”

— Chris Crutcher

28. “Leave me alone, you big fat shitburger!”

— Chris Crutcher

29. “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?”

— Chris Crutcher

30. “There’s only one thing to say to the censors: Shut up.”

— Chris Crutcher

31. “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.”

— Chris Crutcher

32. “Sarah Byrnes was home with Lemery and safe from her father. I knew i didnt have to protect her anymore now that she is with someone I trust.”

— Chris Crutcher

33. “It wasn’t a very Christian thing to do, that’s all.”

— Chris Crutcher

34. “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.”

— Chris Crutcher

35. “If you were to look at each atom as a universe unto itself, think of the number of universes within each of us.”

— Chris Crutcher

36. “He goes for people’s open wounds, then brings God in with air support. You have to agree, there’s a certain cowardice to that approach.”

— Chris Crutcher

37. “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

38. “You have to be mad in the language you’re mad in.”

— Chris Crutcher

39. “Of all my dysfunctional behaviors, she hates me putting empty containers back where they don’t belong. “I don’t care if you weigh seven hundred pounds the rest of your life and don’t stop picking your nose till you’re forty,” she told me once, “but if you put one more empty container anywhere but in the garbage, I’ll have you put to sleep.”

— Chris Crutcher

40. “It seems to me if you don’t know anything about child development you shouldn’t intimate in your ‘reporting’ that you do.”

— Chris Crutcher

41. “Then he said if I ever want to see how something works, just look at it broken.”

— Chris Crutcher

42. “He doesn’t believe butt time on planet Earth doesn’t neccessarily makes you wise.”

— Chris Crutcher

43. “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.”

— Chris Crutcher

44. “I think the value in books like mine, and a great number by other talented writers, is in the ability to bring dark subjects into the open where they are not so dark, where they can be talked about and considered by teens and adults alike.”

— Chris Crutcher

45. “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.”

— Chris Crutcher

46. “Certainly working with teens keeps me up to date with language and with certain kinds of thinking. I often feel like I have to go back to that 17-year-old Chris Crutcher, and that forms the core voice. I can draw on teens from 1964 to 2001 to find a part of the voice I need.”

— Chris Crutcher

47. “I can’t think of a subject that is taboo for me, unless it’s one I simply don’t know anything about.”

— Chris Crutcher

48. “Censors can make a case for zero tolerance in language. They can make the argument that since we don’t allow our children to use that language in schools, we also shouldn’t give them stories in which it is used.”

— Chris Crutcher

49. “My dad leaves bruises on the inside.”

— Chris Crutcher