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. . . [T]o live not with hands clenched to grasp, to strike, to hold tight to a life that is always slipping away the more tightly we hold it, but . . . to live with the hands stretched out both to give and receive with gladness.
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
Always
Receive
Tightly
Life
Hold
Stretched
Peace
Gladness
Away
Slipping
Hands
Tight
Give
Grasp
Live
Strike
Giving
Strikes
Clenched
More quotes by Frederick Buechner
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
Not to love is, psychically, spiritually, to die. To live for yourself alone, hoarding your life for your own sake, is in almost every sense that matters to reduce your life to a life hardly worth the living, and thus to lose it.
Frederick Buechner
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
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
The magic of words is that they have power to do more than convey meaning not only do they have the power to make things clear, they make things happen.
Frederick Buechner
One life on this earth is all that we get, whether it is enough or not enough, and the obvious conclusion would seem to be that at the very least we are fools if we do not live it as fully and bravely and beautifully as we can.
Frederick Buechner
Despair has been called the unforgivable sin-not presumably because God refuses to forgive it, but because it despairs of the possibility of being forgiven.
Frederick Buechner
You can't be too careful what you tell a child because you never know what he'll take hold of and spend the rest of his life remembering you by.
Frederick Buechner
Grace is something you can never get but only be given.
Frederick Buechner
A God in the hand is worth two in the bush.
Frederick Buechner
Vocation is the place where the world's greatest need and a person's greatest joy meet.
Frederick Buechner
You hear as many things as you would imagine. I hear voices of people I loved once. I hear moments that took place. I hear silences.
Frederick Buechner
Speak in your own voice and speak about things that you have in some sense witnessed, not just things you read about or have been taught about in seminary. To talk about the resurrection, think about those moments where in some way you have been resurrected.
Frederick Buechner
Even the saddest things can become, once we have made peace with them, a source of wisdom and strength.
Frederick Buechner
The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done....the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet
Frederick Buechner
Faith is not being sure where you're going, but going anyway.
Frederick Buechner
Snobs are people who look down on other people, but that does not justify our looking down on them. Who can say what dark fears of being inferior lurk behind their superior airs or what they suffer in private for the slights they dish out in public?
Frederick Buechner
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
The other day, the way people [do] who are approaching their 80th birthday, I was thinking about all the last business - funerals and where do you want to be buried - and I thought if anything were to be inscribed on my tombstone, I said let it be that.
Frederick Buechner
Almost nothing that makes any real difference can be proved.
Frederick Buechner
