Frederick Buechner quotes

The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you. (Frederick Buechner)
The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet. View quote
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. View quote
Frederick Buechner
In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints. View quote
Frederick Buechner
To confess your sins to God is not to tell [God] anything [God] doesn't already know. Until you confess them, however, they are the abyss between you. When you confess them, they become the bridge. View quote
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. View quote
Frederick Buechner
God himself does not give answers. He gives himself. View quote
Frederick Buechner
Faith is stepping out into the unknown with nothing to guide us but a hand just beyond our grasp. View quote
Frederick Buechner
Part of the inner world of everyone is this sense of emptiness, unease, incompleteness, and I believe that this in itself is a word from God, that this is the sound that God's voice makes in a world that has explained him away. In such a world, I suspect that maybe God speaks to us most clearly through his silence, his absence, so that we know him best through our missing him. View quote
Frederick Buechner
Pay mind to your own life, your own health, and wholeness. A bleeding heart is of no help to anyone if it bleeds to death. View quote
Frederick Buechner
The original, shimmering self gets buried so deep that most of us end up hardly living out of it at all. Instead we live out all the other selves, which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world's weather. (Frederick Buechner)
Grace is something you can never get but only be given. View quote
Frederick Buechner
Sin and grace, absence and presence, tragedy and comedy, they divide the world between them and where they meet head on, the Gospel happens. View quote
Frederick Buechner
One of the blunders religious people are particularly fond of making is the attempt to be more spiritual than God. View quote
Frederick Buechner
And now brothers, I will ask you a terrible question, and God knows I ask it also of myself. Is the truth beyond all truths, beyond the stars, just this: that to live without him is the real death, that to die with him the only life? View quote
Frederick Buechner
If you have never known the power of God's love, then maybe it is because you have never asked to know it - I mean really asked, expecting an answer. View quote
Frederick Buechner
if you don't have doubts you're either kidding yourself or asleep. Doubts are the ants-in-the-pants of faith. They keep it alive and moving. View quote
Frederick Buechner
Thus, when you wake up in the morning, called by God to be a self again, if you want to know who you are, watch your feet. Because where your feet take you, that is who you are. View quote
Frederick Buechner
It is as impossible for man to demonstrate the existence of God as it would be for even Sherlock Holmes to demonstrate the existence of Arthur Conan Doyle. View quote
Frederick Buechner
If it seems a childish thing to do, do it in remembrance that you are a child. View quote
Frederick Buechner
From the simplest lyric to the most complex novel and densest drama, literature is asking us to pay attention. Pay attention to the frog. Pay attention to the west wind. Pay attention to the boy on the raft, the lady in the tower, the old man on the train. In sum, pay attention to the world and all that dwells therein and thereby learn at last to pay attention to yourself and all that dwells therein. (Frederick Buechner)
When friends speak overmuch of times gone by, often it's because they sense their present time is turning them from friends to strangers. Long before the moment came to say goodbye, I think, we said goodbye in other words and ways and silences. Then when the moment came for it at last, we didn't say it as should be said by friends. So now at last, dear Mouse, with many, many years between: goodbye. View quote
Frederick Buechner
The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around. View quote
Frederick Buechner
It's less the words they say than those they leave unsaid that split old friends apart. View quote
Frederick Buechner
Religion points to that area of human experience where in one way or another man comes upon mystery as a summons to pilgrimage. View quote
Frederick Buechner