Frederick Buechner Quotes

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Without somehow destroying me in the process, how could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there were no room for doubt, there would be no room for me.

Frederick Buechner
Not to love is, psychically, spiritually, to die. To live for yourself alone, hoarding your life for your own sake, is in almost every sense that matters to reduce your life to a life hardly worth the living, and thus to lose it.

Frederick Buechner
Your calling is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.

Frederick Buechner
The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.

Frederick Buechner
The Gospel writers are not really interested primarily in the facts of the birth but in the significance, the meaning for them of that birth just as the people who love us are not really interested primarily in the facts of our births but in what it meant to them when we were born and how for them the world was never the same again, how their whole lives were changed with new significance.

Frederick Buechner
Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.

Frederick Buechner
In other words to live Eternal Life in the full and final sense is to be with God as Christ is with him, and with each other as Christ is with us.

Frederick Buechner
Think of these pages as graffiti maybe, and where I have scratched up in a public place my longings and loves, my grievances and indecencies, be reminded in private of your own. In that way, at least, we can hold a kind of converse.

Frederick Buechner
Avarice, greed, concupiscence and so forth are all based on the mathematical truism that the more you get, the more you have. The remark of that it is more blessed to give than to receive is based on the human truth that the more you give away in love, the more you are. It is not just for the sake of other people that tells us to give rather than get, but for our own sakes too.

Frederick Buechner
Remember Jesus of Nazareth, staggering on broken feet out of the tomb toward the Resurrection, bearing on his body the proud insignia of the defeat which is victory, the magnificent defeat of the human soul at the hands of God.

Frederick Buechner
When a child is born, a father is born. A mother is born, too of course, but at least for her it's a gradual process. Body and soul, she has nine months to get used to what's happening. She becomes what's happening. But for even the best-prepared father, it happens all at once. On the other side of a plate-glass window, a nurse is holding up something roughly the size of a loaf of bread for him to see for the first time.

Frederick Buechner
I not only have my secrets, I am my secrets. And you are yours. Our secrets are human secrets, and our trusting each other enough to share them with each other has much to do with the secret of what it means to be human.

Frederick Buechner
Life is grace. Sleep is forgiveness. The night absolves. Darkness wipes the slate clean, not spotless to be sure, but clean enough for another day's chalking.

Frederick Buechner
You can survive on your own; you can grow strong on your own; you can prevail on your own; but you cannot become human on your own.

Frederick Buechner
Maybe at the heart of all our traveling is the dream of someday, somehow, getting Home.

Frederick Buechner
The world is full of people who seem to have listened to the wrong voice and are now engaged in life work in which they find no pleasure or purpose and who run the risk of suddenly realizing someday that they have spent the only years they are ever going to get in this world doing something which could not matter less to themselves or to anyone else.

Frederick Buechner
The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.

Frederick Buechner
In the long run, there can be no joy for anybody until there is joy finally for us all

Frederick Buechner
Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back—in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.

Frederick Buechner
Joy is a mystery because it can happen anywhere, anytime, even under the most unpromising circumstances, even in the midst of suffering, with tears in its eyes....

Frederick Buechner
My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours.

Frederick Buechner
It is important to tell our secrets too because... it makes it easier for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own, and exchanges like that have a lot to do with what being a family is all about and what being human is all about.

Frederick Buechner