You can't judge Islam by those people any more than you can judge Christians by abortion clinic bombers or white separatists. Love turn to hate at the fringes of any belief system.

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.

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

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

It seems to me if you don't know anything about child development you shouldn't intimate in your "reporting" that you do.

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

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.