Frederick Buechner Quotes

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.

Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.

If the world is sane, then Jesus is mad as a hatter and the Last Supper is the Mad Tea Party. The world says, Mind your own business, and Jesus says, There is no such thing as your own business. The world says, Follow the wisest course and be a success, and Jesus says, Follow me and be crucified. The world says, Drive carefully — the life you save may be your own — and Jesus says, Whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. The world says, Law and order, and Jesus says, Love. The world says, Get and Jesus says, Give. In terms of the world's sanity, Jesus is crazy as a coot, and anybody who thinks he can follow him without being a little crazy too is laboring less under a cross than under a delusion.

It is not objective proof of God's existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God's presence.

With words as valueless as poker chips, we play games whose object it is to keep us from seeing each other’s cards.

God in his unending greatness and glory and man in his unending littleness, prepared for the worst but rarely for the best, prepared for the possible but rarely for the impossible.

So we are told to love. We are told to listen. We are told to look. But a lot of the time we don’t because we choose damn well not to, and because only a saint could do it all the time, I think. You have to choose who to listen to because if you listen to everybody and you look at everybody — seeing every face the way Rembrandt saw that woman’s face — how could you make it down half a city block? You couldn’t. If you listened to what everybody says to you, how could you survive a day? But we can do more than we do — more than we do, surely we could do that.

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.

You use your real voice with those you love, and you cannot be phony with those who know you well.

We can know that in the beginning there was God and not just some cosmic upheaval that brought light out of darkness only when we have experienced him doing the same thing in our lives, our world — bringing light out of our darkness

The life thatI touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.

Unbelief is as much of a choice as belief is. What makes it in many ways more appealing is that whereas to believe in something requires some measure of understanding and effort, not to believe doesn't require much of anything at all.

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.

What’s lost is nothing to what’s found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.

Words written fifty years ago, a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, can have as much of this power today as ever they had it then to come alive for us and in us and to make us more alive within ourselves. That, I suppose, is the final mystery as well as the final power of words: That not even across great distances of time and space do they ever lose their capacity for becoming incarnate. And when these words tell of virtue and nobility, when they move closer to that truth and gentleness of spirit by which we become fully human, the reading of them is sacramental; and a library is as holy a place as any temple is holy because through the words which are treasured in it the Word itself becomes flesh again and again and dwells among us and within us, full of grace and truth.
Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember, in an essay called The Speaking and Writing of Words.