The voices / 22 fragments

Chris Crutcher

Dates not recorded

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Archive entries

01Undated

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

Chris Crutcher / quote

02Undated

Nothing exists without its opposite.

Chris Crutcher / quote

03Undated

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 / quote

04Undated

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 / quote

05Undated

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 / quote

06Undated

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 / quote

07Undated

...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 / quote

08Undated

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!)

Chris Crutcher / quote

09Undated

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 / quote

10Undated

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 / quote

11Undated

...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 / quote

12Undated

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.

Chris Crutcher / quote

13Undated

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.

Chris Crutcher / quote

14Undated

Comedy is tragedy standing on its head with its pants down.

Chris Crutcher / quote

15Undated

144461I know very little having to do with human beings that doesn't also have to do with connection. We want to be noticed, we want to be good enough, we want friends, and we want to be loved. We want our place to stand.

Chris Crutcher / quote

16Undated

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

Chris Crutcher / quote

17Undated

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 / quote

18Undated

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 / quote

19Undated

We get crazy when we can't make things be like the world tells us they are". She looked back out the window. "It was that way for me and your brother, I think. I mean, how could I have loved him that last year? I didn't even know who he was. He was way more attracted to drugs and bikers and that whole lifestyle than he was to me. But somebody told me that if you really loved somebody,you stayed with him no matter what. You had to fight for him." She laughe. "Hell, I was convinced.

Chris Crutcher / quote

20Undated

What I hope my writing reflects... is a sense of the connections between all human beings... and a different perspective on the true nature of courage. For me, those are things worth exploring and writing about.

Chris Crutcher / quote

21Undated

When you're watching somebody read your material and they smile and nod, you know you've found that place where your experience and their experience match, even though they aren't the same exact experience.

Chris Crutcher / quote

22Undated

If you're writing about angry people, you use the language of anger. If you're writing about desperate people, you use the language of desperation.

Chris Crutcher / quote