Top 100 Buechner's Quotes
#1. You don't have to be in the habit of going to church to listen to such a literary minister; you don't have to be a believer to be moved by Mr. Buechner's faith.
John Irving
#2. 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
#3. It is not the objective proof of God's existence that we want but the experience of God's presence. That is the miracle we are really after, and that is also, I think, the miracle that we really get.
Frederick Buechner
#4. It's all so verbal in the Protestant church. You've heard these words a million times before. Maybe people are leaving the church because they find the church has nothing that they're looking for.
Frederick Buechner
#5. To be a saint is to be a little out of one's mind, which is a very good thing to be a little out of from time to time. It is to live a life that is always giving itself away and yet is always full.
Frederick Buechner
#6. When someone we love suffers, we suffer with that person, and we would not have it otherwise, because the suffering and the love are one, just as it is with God's love for us.
Frederick Buechner
#8. 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
#9. Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else's skin. It's 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
#10. A Christian is one who points at Christ and says, 'I can't prove a thing, but there's something about his eyes and his voice. There's something about the way he carries his head, his hands, the way he carries his cross-the way he carries me.'
Frederick Buechner
#11. We must be careful with our lives, for Christ's sake, because it would seem that they are the only lives we are going to have in this puzzling and perilous world, and so they are very precious and what we do with them matters enormously.
Frederick Buechner
#12. If it please you, the lady's name again? says Reginald. His quill is poised. If God had come to Reginald and not to Moses in the burning bush, he would have asked him how to spell the great I AM so he'd be sure he had it right.
Frederick Buechner
#13. When a man leaves home, he leaves behind some scrap of his heart ... It's the same with a place a man is going to. Only then he sends a scrap of his heart ahead.
Frederick Buechner
#15. Preaching and writing - it's the same. Whether I'm writing to speak or writing to be read in a book, it's the same thing. Y
Frederick Buechner
#16. Your vocation lies in the intersection of the world's deep need and your deep joy.
Frederick Buechner
#17. When [our secrets] are sad and hurtful secrets, like my father's death, we can in a way honor the hurt by letting ourselves feel it as we never let ourselves feel it before, and then, having felt it, by laying it aside; we can start to take care of ourselves the way we take care of people we love.
Frederick Buechner
#18. It's less the words they say than those they leave unsaid that split old friends apart.
Frederick Buechner
#19. The sadness was I'd lost a father I had never fully found. It's like a tune that ends before you've heard it out. Your whole life through you search to catch the strain, and seek the face you've lost in strangers' faces.
Frederick Buechner
#20. There's no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or earn good looks or bring about your own birth.
Frederick Buechner
#21. Have you ever hung a piece of black velvet behind you and looked at yourself in the mirror? We are each of us quite alone, and that's what I try to paint.
Thomas S. Buechner
#23. 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.
Frederick Buechner
#24. Don't look down on them for looking down on us. Look at them, instead, as friends we don't know yet and who don't yet know what they are missing in not knowing us.
Frederick Buechner
#25. I can only assume that he must have dreamed it up at the last minute and ad-libbed it - and on just such foolish, tenuous, holy threads as that, I suppose, hang the destinies of us all.
Frederick Buechner
#26. The incarnation is a kind of vast joke whereby the Creator of the ends of the earth comes among us in diapers ... Until we too have taken the idea of the God-man seriously enough to be scandalized by it, we have not taken it as seriously as it demands to be taken.
Frederick Buechner
#27. What makes you, in the deepest sense of the word, happy? That's what you should be doing, if the other part is also met - if it is something the world needs.
Frederick Buechner
#28. That's five friends, one each for Jesu's wounds, and Godric bears their mark still on what's left of him as in their time they all bore his on them. What's friendship, when all's done, but the giving and taking of wounds?
Frederick Buechner
#29. An artist is either good at color or good at value but rarely good at both. I focus on the tonal range, the dark-light effects, rather than the full color range of bright colors. I just don't know what to do with all those cadmiums.
Thomas S. Buechner
#30. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's hunger meet.
Frederick Buechner
#31. Like Buddha under the Bo tree, Jesus, on his tree, has his eyes closed too. The difference is this. The pain and sadness of the world that Buddha's eyes close out is the pain and sadness of the world that the eyes of Jesus close in.
Frederick Buechner
#32. I'm trying to listen to my past, listen to what's most deeply going on inside myself, my creative set of fictional characters, a fictional world - to listen to that world, to search.
Frederick Buechner
#33. I'm not going to spend any time looking into myself the way one who prays does. Maybe that's an even worse mistake than praying might be.
Frederick Buechner
#34. 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
#35. I'm not religious in the sense that I do not subscribe to any particular set of religious dogma. I don't go to church. I don't read the Bible. But I believe that the word "Spirit" with a capital S points to an ultimate reality which I give my heart to.
Frederick Buechner
#36. What deadens us most to God's presence within us, I think, is the inner dialogue that we are continually engaged in with ourselves, the endless chatter of human thought.
Frederick Buechner
#37. I have never painted as well as I thought I should, so frustration came early ...
Thomas S. Buechner
#38. 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
#39. As Frederick Buechner wrote, Vocation is the place where our deep gladness meets the world's deep need.
Jeff Goins
#40. I suspect that Jesus spoke many of his parables as a kind of sad and holy joke and that that may be part of why he seemed reluctant to explain them because if you have to explain a joke, you might as well save your breath.
Frederick Buechner
#41. To believe in Christ is to give your heart to Christ, which means not to affirm things about Christ, but it's like what you mean when you say, "I believe in my friend."
Frederick Buechner
#42. Wherever people love each other and are true to each other and take risks for each other, God is with them and for them and they are doing God's will.
Frederick Buechner
#43. Have you really seen God?" he said, placing his hand on the young man's shoulder and fixing him with his protuberant eyes.
Believing that the sound he could hear of a thousand voices singing was no longer the wind, Averill said, "I am seeing him now.
Frederick Buechner
#44. My prayer is spasmodic, occasional, desperate. It has a great deal to do with my children's physical well-being - that when they're traveling in the air the plane not crash, things like that.
Frederick Buechner
#45. His was the holiest face I ever saw. My very name turned holy on his tongue. If he had bade me rise and follow to the end of time, I would have gone. If he had bade me die for him, I would have died. When I deserved it least, God gave me most. I think it was the savior's face I saw.
Frederick Buechner
#46. The place to which God calls you is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.
Frederick Buechner
#47. 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
#48. Listen to your life. Listen to what happens to you because it is through what happens to you that God speaks ... It's in language that's not always easy to decipher, but it's there, powerfully, memorably, unforgettably.
Frederick Buechner
#49. I'm interested in human vulnerability. We are alone, and my portraits reflect this quality. I don't want anything to get in the way of this feeling.
Thomas S. Buechner
#50. The world is in pain, and its pain makes strangers of us all and ties my tongue in a lover's knot.
Frederick Buechner
#51. Christopher Knowles, Buechner, Heiner Mueller, Burroughs, Chekhov, Shakespeare - it's all one body of work.
Robert Wilson
#52. 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
#53. The best moments any of us have as human beings are those moments when for a little while it is possible to escape the squirrel-cage of being me into the landscape of being us.
Frederick Buechner
#54. 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
#55. A single model enables me to focus on one thing at a time, separating design and form and color into three successive stages.
Thomas S. Buechner
#56. In New England, especially, [faith] is like sex. It's very personal. You don't bring it out and talk about it.
Frederick Buechner
#57. The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.
Frederick Buechner
#58. How do I happen to believe in God? . . . Writing novels, I got into the habit of looking for plots. After awhile, I began to suspect that my own life had a plot. And after awhile more, I began to suspect that life itself has a plot. - FREDERICK BUECHNER
Sarah Arthur
#59. Do good work. Don't worry about expressing yourself. Figure out what you do well and make it better.
Thomas S. Buechner
#60. Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.
Frederick Buechner
#61. All other days have either disappeared into darkness and oblivion or not yet emerged from it. Today is the only day there is.
Frederick Buechner
#62. In the long run, there can be no joy for anybody until there is joy finally for us all
Frederick Buechner
#63. 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
#64. I think that I learned something about how even tragedy can be a means of grace that I might never have come to any other way.
Frederick Buechner
#65. Vocation is the place where the world's greatest need and a person's greatest joy meet.
Frederick Buechner
#66. Lord, catch me off guard today. Surprise me with some moment of beauty or pain so that at least for the moment, I may be startled into seeing that you are here in all your splendor, always and everywhere, barely hidden, beneath, beyond, within this life I breathe.
Frederick Buechner
#67. Every person has one particular time in his life when he is more beautiful than he is ever going to be again. For some it is at seven, for others at seventeen or seventy, and as Laura Fleischman read out loud from Shakespeare, I remember thinking that for her it was probably just then.
Frederick Buechner
#68. Many an atheist is a believer without knowing it juast as many a believer is an atheist without knowing it. You can sincerely believe there is no God and live as though there is. You can sincerely believe there is a God and live as though there isn't.
Frederick Buechner
#69. At least for a moment we all saw, I think, that the danger of pluralism is that it becomes factionalism, and that if factions grind their separate axes too vociferously, something mutual, precious, and human is in danger of being drowned out and lost.
Frederick Buechner
#70. The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.
Frederick Buechner
#71. It's not as if I knew answers which I am going to set down in the form of a novel or a memoir or a sermon. It's, rather, I'm going to search myself for what I might have to say in this area.
Frederick Buechner
#72. Pay attention to the things that bring a tear to your eye or a lump in your throat because they are signs that the holy is drawing near.
Frederick Buechner
#73. know that neither to have the child nor not to have the child is without the possibility of tragic consequences for everybody yet (b) be brave in knowing also that not even that can put us beyond the forgiving love of God.
Frederick Buechner
#74. Again - "Are you going home for Christmas?" - and asked it in some sort of way that brought tears to my eyes and made it almost unnecessary for him to move on to his answer to the question, which was that home, finally, is the manger in Bethlehem, the place where at midnight even the oxen kneel.
Frederick Buechner
#75. Words spoken in deep love or deep hate set things in motion in the human heart that can never be reversed
Frederick Buechner
#76. Turn around and believe that the good news that we are loved is better than we ever dared hope, and that to believe in that good news, to live out of it and toward it, to be in love with that good news, is of all glad things in this world the gladdest thing of all. Amen, and come Lord Jesus.
Frederick Buechner
#77. The preacher speaks both the word of tragedy and the word of comedy because they are both of them the truth and because Jesus speaks them both ...
Frederick Buechner
#78. A miracle is when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A miracle is when one plus one equals a thousand.
Frederick Buechner
#79. 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.
Frederick Buechner
#80. 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
#81. This side of Nirvana, there is no such escape for any of us as far as I know.
Frederick Buechner
#82. You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.
Frederick Buechner
#83. 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
Frederick Buechner
#84. Lord, I believe; help my unbelief' is the best any of us can do really, but thank God it is enough.
Frederick Buechner
#85. Jesus didn't come to merely speak words that were true, He is the Word that makes us true.
Frederick Buechner
#86. We find by losing. We hold fast by letting go. We become something new by ceasing to be something old.
Frederick Buechner
#87. Here and there even in our world, and now and then, even in ourselves, we catch glimpeses of a New Creation, which, fleeting as those glipmses are apt to be, give us hope both for this life and for whatever life may await us later on.
Frederick Buechner
#91. 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
#92. I was deeply influenced by an Episcopal laywoman named Agnes Sanford, who in her day was quite famous as a faith healer, which is a term I've always distrusted, because it conjures up charlatanry. She was not a charlatan. She was the real thing, and she had had remarkable healings.
Frederick Buechner
#93. It is in the intellectual and emotional response, the conscious and subconscious associations of the artist, that the potential power of painting lies.
Thomas S. Buechner
#94. 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
#95. 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.
Frederick Buechner
#97. Remember that the lives of other people are not your business. They are their business. They are God's business because they all have God whether they use the word God or not. Even your own life is not your business. It also is God's business. Leave it to God.
Frederick Buechner
#98. To be bored is to turn a cold shoulder to engage all that God is and has for you in the moment.
Frederick Buechner
#99. We cannot make the Kingdom of God happen, but we can put out leaves as it draws near. We can be kind to each other. We can be kind to ourselves. We can drive back the darkness a little. We can make green places within ourselves and among ourselves where God can make his Kingdom happen.
Frederick Buechner
#100. 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
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