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If preachers decide to preach about hope, let them preach out of what they themselves hope for.

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
Preachers
Preach
Preacher
Preaching
Decide
Hope

More quotes by Frederick Buechner

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I'm trying to listen to my past, listen to what's most deeply going on inside myself, my creative set of fictional characters, a fictional world - to listen to that world, to search.
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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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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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
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She was right that reality can be harsh and that you shut your eyes to it only at your peril because if you do not face up to the enemy in all his dark power, then the enemy will come up from behind some dark day and destoy you while you are facing the other way.
Frederick Buechner
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Coincidences are God's way of getting our attention.
Frederick Buechner
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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
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You can never be sure whether you are discovering the truth or inventing it.
Frederick Buechner
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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
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Unbelief is as much of a choice as belief is. What makes it in many ways more appealing is that whereas to believe in something requires some measure of understanding and effort, not to believe doesn't require much of anything at all.
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.
Frederick Buechner
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The world says, The more you take, the more you have. Christ says, the more you give, the more you are.
Frederick Buechner
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Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.
Frederick Buechner
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God in his unending greatness and glory and man in his unending littleness, prepared for the worst but rarely for the best, prepared for the possible but rarely for the impossible.
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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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
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Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.
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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. . . [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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The first ministers were the twelve disciples. There is no evidence that Jesus chose them because they are brighter or nicer than other people. Their sole qualification seems to have been their initial willingness to rise to their feet when Jesus said, Follow me.
Frederick Buechner