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Sin and grace, absence and presence, tragedy and comedy, they divide the world between them and where they meet head on, the Gospel happens.
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
World
Sin
Dividing
Meet
Divide
Grace
Divides
Comedy
Ministers
Head
Gospel
Religious
Absence
Christian
Presence
Happens
Tragedy
Presbyterians
More quotes by Frederick Buechner
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
Coincidences are God's way of getting our attention.
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
If you talk about sin, you don't have to use the first person singular, but speak out of that part of yourself which knows what it means to become estranged from people you love. Speak in your own voice about things that you in your own life have in one way or another experienced.
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
Your vocation lies in the intersection of the world's deep need and your deep joy.
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
Maybe at the heart of all our traveling is the dream of someday, somehow, getting Home.
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
To be bored to death is a form of suicide.
Frederick Buechner
A God in the hand is worth two in the bush.
Frederick Buechner
Listen. Your life is happening. You are happening. Think back on your journey. The music of your life.
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
Toleration is often just indifference in disguise.
Frederick Buechner
Envy is the consuming desire to have everybody else as unsuccessful as you are.
Frederick Buechner
The difference to me is not between the believers on one hand and the nonbelievers on the other hand. It's between people who carry in their hearts some sense of what the word God, at least to me, means, which is a loving, creating, everlastingly renewing presence deeply concerned with the well-being of the earth and all its creatures.
Frederick Buechner
If what makes you happy is going out and living it up and spending all your money on wine, women, and song, the world doesn't need that. But on the other hand, if you give your life to good works - you go and work in a leper colony and it doesn't make you happy - the chances are you're not doing it very well.
Frederick Buechner
Five friends I had and two of them snakes.
Frederick Buechner
Vocation is the place where the world's greatest need and a person's greatest joy meet.
Frederick Buechner
...words are not only meaning but music and magic and power.
Frederick Buechner
