1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Frederick Buechner

Frederick Buechner Quotes

Carl Frederick Buechner is an American writer and theologian. He is an ordained Presbyterian minister and the author of more than thirty published books. His work encompasses different genres, including fiction, autobiography, essays and sermons, and his career has spanned six decades. Buechner's books have been translated into many languages for publication around the world. He is best known for his works A Long Day's Dying ; The Book of Bebb, a tetralogy based on the character Leo Bebb published in 1979; Godric, a first person narrative of the life of the medieval saint, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1981; Brendan, a second novel narrating a saint's life, published in 1987; Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner ; and his autobiographical works The Sacred Journey , Now and Then , Telling Secrets , and The Eyes of the Heart: Memoirs of the Lost and Found . He has been called "Major talent" and "...a very good writer indeed" by the New York Times, and "one of our most original storytellers" by USA Today. Annie Dillard says: "Frederick Buechner is one of our finest writers."

Buechner's work has often been praised for its ability to inspire readers to see the grace in their daily lives. As stated in the London Free Press, "He is one of our great novelists because he is one of our finest religious writers." He has been a finalist for the National Book Award Presented by the National Book Foundation and the Pulitzer Prize, and has been awarded eight honorary degrees from such institutions as Yale University and the Virginia Theological Seminary. In addition, Buechner has been the recipient of the O. Henry Award, the Rosenthal Award, the Christianity and Literature Belles Lettres Prize, and has been recognized by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He is continually listed among the most read authors by Christian audiences.

✵ 11. July 1926
Frederick Buechner photo

Works

Godric
Godric
Frederick Buechner
Godric
Godric
Frederick Buechner
Frederick Buechner: 67 quotes13 likes

Famous Frederick Buechner Quotes

“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

Source: Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation (1983)

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

Frederick Buechner

Wishful Thinking, p. 95
Variant: Vocation is the place where our deep gladness meets the world's deep need.
Source: Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (1973)

“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

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

Frederick Buechner

Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner (1992)
Source: Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith

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

Frederick Buechner

Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (1973)
Context: 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 Quotes about God

“If we are to believe he is really alive with all that that implies, then we have to believe without proof. And of course that is the only way it could be. If it could be somehow proved, then we would have no choice but to believe. We would lose our freedom not to believe. And in the very moment that we lost that freedom, we would cease to be human beings. Our love of God would have been forced upon us, and love that is forced is of course not love at all. Love must be freely given. Love must live in the freedom not to love; it must take risks. Love must be prepared to suffer even as Jesus on the Cross suffered, and part of that suffering is doubt.”

Frederick Buechner

The Magnificent Defeat (1966)

“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

Source: The Magnificent Defeat (1966)

“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

“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

Source: Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC

“Without somehow destroying me in the process, how could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there were no room for doubt, there would be no room for me.”

Frederick Buechner

“Remember Jesus of Nazareth, staggering on broken feet out of the tomb toward the Resurrection, bearing on his body the proud insignia of the defeat which is victory, the magnificent defeat of the human soul at the hands of God.”

Frederick Buechner

Source: The Magnificent Defeat

Frederick Buechner Quotes about the trip

“Coincidences are God's way of getting our attention.”

Frederick Buechner

“For outlandish creatures like us, on our way to a heart, a brain, and courage, Bethlehem is not the end of our journey but only the beginning - not home but the place through which we must pass if ever we are to reach home at last.”

Frederick Buechner

Source: The Magnificent Defeat

“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

Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner (1992)

“You enter the extraordinary by way of the ordinary”

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.”

Frederick Buechner book Godric

Godric (1980)

“Our house is on the eastern slope of Rupert Mountain, just off a country road, still unpaved then, and five miles from the nearest town…Even at the most unpromising times of year – in mudtime, on bleak, snowless winter days – it is in so many unexpected ways beautiful that even after all this time I have never quite gotten used to it. I have seen other places equally beautiful in my time, but never, anywhere, have I seen one more so.”

Frederick Buechner

Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation (1983)

Frederick Buechner: Trending quotes

“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

Source: The Hungering Dark

“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

Source: The Alphabet of Grace

“Go where your best prayers take you.”

Frederick Buechner

Frederick Buechner Quotes

“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

“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

Source: The Alphabet of Grace (1970)

“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

“To be wise is to be eternally curious.”

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

Source: Telling Secrets (1991)

“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.”

Frederick Buechner

“Joy is a mystery because it can happen anywhere, anytime, even under the most unpromising circumstances, even in the midst of suffering, with tears in its eyes….”

Frederick Buechner

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

Frederick Buechner book Godric

Source: Godric (1980)

“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

Source: The Magnificent Defeat (1966)

“Lust is the craving for salt of a man who is dying of thirst.”

Frederick Buechner

Source: Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC

“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

Source: The Alphabet of Grace (1970)

“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

Source: Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (1973)

“God himself does not give answers. He gives himself.”

Frederick Buechner

Telling the Truth (1977)
Source: Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale

“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

Source: The Sacred Journey: A Memoir of Early Days (1982)

“Whether you call on him or don't call on him, God will be present with you.”

Frederick Buechner

Source: Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation

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

Frederick Buechner

Source: The Magnificent Defeat (1966)

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

Frederick Buechner

Source: The Magnificent Defeat (1966)

“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

Whistling in the Dark: A Doubter's Dictionary (1988)

“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

Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons (2006)

“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

Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (1973)

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

Frederick Buechner book Godric

Godric (1980)

“Pay attention. As a summation of all that I have had to say as a writer, I would settle for that. And 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

Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons (2006)

“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 book Godric

Godric (1980)

“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 book Godric

Godric (1980)

“Stop trying to protect, to rescue, to judge, to manage the lives around you... remember that the lives of others are not your business. They are their business. They are God’s business... even your own life is not your business. It also is God’s business. Leave it to God. It is an astonishing thought. It can become a life-transforming thought... unclench the fists of your spirit and take it easy... What deadens us most to God’s presence within us, I think, is the inner dialogue that we are continuously engaged in with ourselves, the endless chatter of human thought. I suspect that there is nothing more crucial to true spiritual comfort... than being able from time to time to stop that chatter...”

Frederick Buechner

Telling Secrets (1991)

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

Frederick Buechner

Telling the Truth (1977)

“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

Telling the Truth (1977)

“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

Telling Secrets (1991)

“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

Telling the Truth (1977)

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

Frederick Buechner

Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation (1983)

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

Frederick Buechner

Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (1973)

“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.”

Frederick Buechner

Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner (1992)

“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

Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation (1983)

“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

Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (1973)

“Five friends I had, and two of them snakes.”

Frederick Buechner book Godric

Godric (1980)

“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

Telling Secrets (1991)

“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

The Alphabet of Grace (1970)

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

Frederick Buechner

Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith (1979)

“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 book Godric

Godric (1980)

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

Frederick Buechner

Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons (2006)

“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 book Godric

Godric (1980)

“I wanted to learn about Christ – about the Old Testament, which had been his Bible, and the New Testament, which was the Bible about him; about the history of the church, which had been founded on the faith that through him God had not only revealed his innermost nature and his purpose for the world, but had released into the world a fierce power to draw people into that nature and adapt them to that purpose… No intellectual pursuit had ever aroused in me such intense curiosity, and much more than my intellect was involved, much more than my curiosity aroused. In the unfamiliar setting of a Presbyterian church, of all places, I had been moved to astonished tears which came from so deep inside me that to this day I have never fathomed them, I wanted to learn more about the source of those tears and the object of that astonishment.”

Frederick Buechner

Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation (1983)

“How Adewen stuffed her braid in her mouth at that! Or she'd cover her mirth with her hands and shake till you'd think that the fit was upon her. She did the same too when she wept so you'd never be sure which she hid with her hands, her tears or her cackling. I think there were times she herself didn't know, nor does anyone know at times. Laugh till you weep. Weep till there's nothing left but to laugh at your weeping. In the end it's all one.”

Frederick Buechner book Godric

Godric (1980)

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

Frederick Buechner

Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation (1983)

Similar authors

Rudyard Kipling photo
Rudyard Kipling200
English short-story writer, poet, and novelist None
Luigi Pirandello photo
Luigi Pirandello7
Italian dramatist, novelist, short story writer, and poet, … None
Doris Lessing photo
Doris Lessing94
British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer … None
Sinclair Lewis photo
Sinclair Lewis136
American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright None
W. Somerset Maugham photo
W. Somerset Maugham158
British playwright, novelist, short story writer None
Italo Calvino photo
Italo Calvino44
Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels None
Ivo Andrič photo
Ivo Andrič16
novelist, short story writer None
Samuel Beckett photo
Samuel Beckett122
Irish novelist, playwright, and poet None
F. Scott Fitzgerald photo
F. Scott Fitzgerald411
American novelist and screenwriter None
James Joyce photo
James Joyce191
Irish novelist and poet None