Chris Crutcher Quotes

Our family were outsiders, and I've always had a sense of the outsider, the underdog, and a strong sense of justice towards people who are excluded.

If I feel any marginalisation, it's because the things that concern me aren't so important to other people.

The feeling of being an underdog, not belonging, is very much me. You harbour a little feeling of resentment towards the 'upper dog'.

The biggest abuses in society happen when people are not able to communicate and not able to connect.

I swear to the Lord I still can't see Why Democracy means Everybody but me.

If you are on the wrong side of society you can’t win.

We remain the saddest little district of the world, the most miserable people of the world, losing our own persona and not being able to take on anyone else's, torn away and not accepted, alien to all and everyone, including those with whom we are most closely related, but who will not recognize us as their kin. We live on a divide between worlds, at the border between nations, always at a fault to someone and first to be struck. Waves of history strike us as a sea cliff.

I feel as though there's a lot invested in my background in being an outsider.

I know what it's like to think the system has left you behind.

When you walk into a room, and you're the only one of something - the only woman or the only African American - that immediate feeling of loneliness happens.

I am not OK with the system that allows certain people to fail or be chucked out. I don't accept that.

Silence and invisibility go hand in hand with powerlessness.

We seem to be pariahs alike in the visible and the invisible world, with no foothold anywhere, though by every principle of government and religion we should have an equal place on this planet.

Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

Society is better off without certain people.

I see myself in all the people in the world who are suffering and who are very badly treated and who are often made to feel that they have no place on this Earth.

What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.

I think people really need to think what it's like to have all of society arrayed against you.

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.

I think you only really feel like an outsider if you've been an insider.

When an individual is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he does become inferior.

When you use the term minority or minorities in reference to people, you're telling them that they're less than somebody else.

The structure of apartheid is still rooted in the Haitian society. When you have apartheid, you don't see those behind the walls. That is the reality of Haiti.

I'm tired of being treated like a second-class citizen.

If you're gay and you can't hold hands, or you're black and you can't catch a taxi, or you're a woman and you can't go into the park, you are aware there's a menace. That's costly on a psychic level. The world should be striving to make all its members secure.