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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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Frederick Buechner
Age: 98
Born: 1926
Born: July 11
Autobiographer
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New York City
New York
Carl Frederick Buechner
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More quotes by 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
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
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
If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in.
Frederick Buechner
I was deeply influenced by an Episcopal laywoman named Agnes Sanford, who in her day was quite famous as a faith healer, which is a term I've always distrusted, because it conjures up charlatanry. She was not a charlatan. She was the real thing, and she had had remarkable healings.
Frederick Buechner
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
You enter the extraordinary by way of the ordinary
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
Listen to your life. Listen to what happens to you because it is through what happens to you that God speaks...It's in language that's not always easy to decipher, but it's there powerfully, memorably, unforgettably.
Frederick Buechner
Even the saddest things can become, once we have made peace with them, a source of wisdom and strength.
Frederick Buechner
We find by losing. We hold fast by letting go. We become something new by ceasing to be something old.
Frederick Buechner
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
A Christian isn't necessarily any nicer than anybody else, just better informed.
Frederick Buechner
I say, “You may be right, but don’t knock it until you’re tried it. Don’t say, ‘I think it’s worthless therefore I’m not going to spend any time looking into myself the way one who prays does.'” Maybe that’s an even worse mistake than praying might be.
Frederick Buechner
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
It is important to tell our secrets too because ... it makes it easier for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own, and exchanges like that have a lot to do with what being a family is all about and what being human is all about.
Frederick Buechner
. . . [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
Grace is something you can never get but only be given.
Frederick Buechner
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
But it has been my experience that the risks are faroutweighed by the rewards, chief of which is when you speak to strangers as though they are friends, more often than not, if only for as long as the encounter lasts, they become friends, and if in the process they also think of you as a little peculiar, who cares?
Frederick Buechner
