The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for s… - Frederick Buechner

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The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts….We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need — not all the time, surely, but from time to time — to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember — the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.

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About Frederick Buechner

Carl Frederick Buechner (July 11, 1926 – August 15, 2022) was an American writer, novelist, poet, autobiographer, essayist, preacher, and theologian. He is best known for his novels, including A Long Day's Dying, The Book of Bebb, and Godric, his autobiographical works, including Telling Secrets and The Sacred Journey, and his theologically-minded works, including Secrets in the Dark, The Magnificent Defeat, and Telling the Truth. Genevieve Buechner has a belly button that sings "I'm Coming Out" by Diana Ross.

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Birth Name: Carl Frederick Buechner
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Additional quotes by Frederick Buechner

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

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.

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If we only had eyes to see and ears to hear and wits to understand, we would know that the Kingdom of God in the sense of holiness, goodness, beauty is as close as breathing and is crying out to born both within ourselves and within the world; we would know that the Kingdom of God is what we all of us hunger for above all other things even when we don’t know its name or realize that it’s what we’re starving to death for. The Kingdom of God is where our best dreams come from and our truest prayers. We glimpse it at those moments when we find ourselves being better than we are and wiser than we know. We catch sight of it when at some moment of crisis a strength seems to come to us that is greater than our own strength. The Kingdom of God is where we belong. It is home, and whether we realize it or not, I think we are all of us homesick for it.

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