Frederick Buechner

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

— 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.

— 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

Faith is stepping out into the unknown with nothing to guide us but a hand just beyond our grasp.

— Frederick Buechner

'Lord, I believe; help my unbelief' is the best any of us can do really, but thank God it is enough.

— 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?

— 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.

— Frederick Buechner

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

— 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

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.

— Frederick Buechner

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

— Frederick Buechner

Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else's skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.

— 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 awake and moving.

— 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

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 Golden Gate Bridge.

— Frederick Buechner

One of the blunders religious people are particularly fond of making is the attempt to be more spiritual than God.

— Frederick Buechner

If the truth is worth telling, it is worth making a fool of yourself to tell.

— Frederick Buechner

There is a fragrance in the air, a certain passage of a song, an old photograph falling out from the pages of a book, the sound of somebody's voice in the hall that makes your heart leap and fills your eyes with tears. Who can say when or how it will be that something easters up out of the dimness to remind us of a time before we were born and after we will die?

— Frederick Buechner

God himself does not give answers. He gives himself.

— Frederick Buechner

[W]e are none of us very good at silence. It says too much.

— 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.

— Frederick Buechner

Grace is something you can never get but only be given.

— Frederick Buechner

Five friends I had, and two of them snakes.

— Frederick Buechner

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.

— Frederick Buechner

Nothing human's not a broth of false and true.

— Frederick Buechner

It’s less the words they say than those they leave unsaid that split old friends apart.

— Frederick Buechner

He also said we should carve in the year and place where I was born, but I said no. As a man dies many times before he's dead, so does he wend from birth to birth until, by grace, he comes alive at last.

— Frederick Buechner

O thou who art the sparrow's friend," he said, "have mercy on this world that knows not even when it sins. O holy dove, descend and roost on Godric here so that a heart may hatch in him at last. Amen.

— Frederick Buechner

So ever and again young Godric’s dreams well up to flood old Godric’s prayers, or prayers and dreams reach God in such a snarl he has to comb the tangle out, and who knows which he counts more dear.

— 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

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

This side of Nirvana, there is no such escape for any of us as far as I know.

— Frederick Buechner

It is within the bonds of marriage that I, for one, found a greater freedom to be and to become and to share myself than I can imagine ever having found in any other kind of relationship.

— Frederick Buechner

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

— 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

We are commanded to love our neighbors as ourselves, and I believe that to love ourselves means to extend to those various selves that we have been along the way the same degree of compassion and concern that we would extend to anyone else.

— 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

Maybe the most sacred function of memory is just that: to render the distinction between past, present, and future ultimately meaningless; to enable us at some level of our being to inhabit that same eternity which it is said that God himself inhabits.

— Frederick Buechner

Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.

— Frederick Buechner

Religion as a word points to that area of human experience where in one way or another man comes upon mystery as a summons to pilgrimage; where he senses meanings no less overwhelming because they can be only hinted at in myth and ritual; where he glimpses a destination that he can never know fully until he reaches it.

— Frederick Buechner

Pay attention.\xa0As a summation of all that I have had to say as a writer, I would settle for that.\xa0And as a talisman or motto for that journey in search of a homeland, which is what faith is, I would settle for that too.

— 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.

— Frederick Buechner

Words spoken in deep love or deep hate set things in motion within the human heart that can never be reversed.

— 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.

— Frederick Buechner