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To be commanded to love God at all, let alone in the wilderness, is like being commanded to be well when we are sick, to sing for joy when we are dying of thirst, to run when our legs are broken. But this is the first and great commandment nonetheless. Even in the wilderness - especially in the wilderness - you shall love him.

Frederick Buechner

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Frederick Buechner
Age: 98
Born: 1926
Born: July 11
Autobiographer
Novelist
Poet
Theologian
Writer
New York City
New York
Carl Frederick Buechner
Well
Broken
Commandments
First
Joy
Thirst
Great
Shall
Wilderness
Even
Alone
Legs
Love
Faith
Sing
Like
Running
Sick
Commandment
Wells
Dying
Commanded
Firsts
Especially
Nonetheless

More quotes by Frederick Buechner

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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
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If you want to be holy, be kind.
Frederick Buechner
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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 alive and moving.
Frederick Buechner
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Go where your best prayers take you.
Frederick Buechner
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Where your deep gladness meets with the deep hunger of the world, there you will find a further calling.
Frederick Buechner
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I'm a hopeless prayer. I think somewhere in there I spend a great deal of time at it.
Frederick Buechner
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To journey for the sake of saving our own lives is little by little to cease to live in any sense that really matters, even to ourselves, because it is only by journeying for the world's sake - even when the world bores and sickens and scares you half to death - that little by little we start to come alive.
Frederick Buechner
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I don't want to give the impression that I'm a great Bible reader. I don't sit down every day and read for an hour through the Bible. But I really do read it with a great deal of pleasure... which is the last thing I would have suspected. So I read it sometimes as a devotional, but really more, not for fun, but because it's fascinating.
Frederick Buechner
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To be bored to death is a form of suicide.
Frederick Buechner
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Faith is not being sure where you're going, but going anyway.
Frederick Buechner
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Remember me not for the ill I've done but for the good I've dreamed.
Frederick Buechner
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Words spoken in deep love or deep hate set things in motion in the human heart that can never be reversed.
Frederick Buechner
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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
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Like a house in the rain, books were havens of permanence and protection from whatever it was that as a child I needed protection from.
Frederick Buechner
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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
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Even the saddest things can become, once we have made peace with them, a source of wisdom and strength.
Frederick Buechner
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the story of any one of us is in some measure the story of us all
Frederick Buechner
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For as long as you remember me, I am never entirely lost.
Frederick Buechner
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Five friends I had and two of them snakes.
Frederick Buechner
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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