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“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)

“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 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

“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

“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.

“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)

“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

“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

“Go where your best prayers take you.”

Frederick Buechner

“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)

“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

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

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

“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