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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.
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
Joke
Jesus
Breath
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Explain
Parables
May
Breaths
Reluctant
Wells
Seemed
Suspect
Might
Jokes
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More quotes by 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
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
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
If you want to be holy, be kind.
Frederick Buechner
If it seems a childish thing to do, do it in remembrance that you are a child.
Frederick Buechner
Pay attention to the things that bring a tear to your eye or a lump in your throat because they are signs that the holy is drawing near.
Frederick Buechner
To believe in God is to give your heart to God.
Frederick Buechner
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
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
Words spoken in deep love or deep hate set things in motion in the human heart that can never be reversed.
Frederick Buechner
To be bored to death is a form of suicide.
Frederick Buechner
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
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
The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.
Frederick Buechner
Maybe at the heart of all our traveling is the dream of someday, somehow, getting Home.
Frederick Buechner
You enter the extraordinary by way of the ordinary
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
Vocation is the place where the world's greatest need and a person's greatest joy meet.
Frederick Buechner
To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift.
Frederick Buechner
God himself does not give answers. He gives himself.
Frederick Buechner
