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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
Peace
Gladness
Away
Slipping
Hands
Tight
Give
Grasp
Live
Strike
Giving
Strikes
Clenched
Always
Receive
Tightly
Life
Hold
Stretched

More quotes by Frederick Buechner

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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
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Wether you call on him or don't call on him, God will be present with you.
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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.
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The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.
Frederick Buechner
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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
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Theology, like fiction, is largely autobiographical.
Frederick Buechner
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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.
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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
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No words come easily to my lips. I think ultimately - what I like to think is that I'm in some sense hearing the mystery itself.
Frederick Buechner
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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
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People are disturbed not by things but by the view they take of them. They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.
Frederick Buechner
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If the truth is worth telling, it is worth making a fool of yourself to tell it.
Frederick Buechner
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Justice is the grammar of things. Mercy is the poetry of things.
Frederick Buechner
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Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.
Frederick Buechner
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Beneath our clothes, our reputations, our pretensions, beneath our religion or lack of it, we are all vulnerable both to the storm without and the storm within.
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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Envy is the consuming desire to have everybody else as unsuccessful as you are.
Frederick Buechner
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If you want to talk about grace, if you want to talk about revelation, talk about your life with some depth, which doesn't mean lurid revelations as much as simply looking at your own deep experiences and describing them as they are.
Frederick Buechner
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The Jesus who is the one whom we search for even when we do not know that we are searching and hide from even when we do not know that we are hiding.
Frederick Buechner
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A Christian isn't necessarily any nicer than anybody else, just better informed.
Frederick Buechner