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You can never be sure whether you are discovering the truth or inventing it.

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
Discovering
Sure
Whether
Truth
Never
Inventing

More quotes by 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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He [Jesus] speaks in parables, and though we have approached these parables reverentially all these many years and have heard them expounded as grave and reverent vehicles of holy truth, I suspect that many if not all of them were originally not grave at all but were antic, comic, often more than just a little shocking.
Frederick Buechner
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Maybe at the heart of all our traveling is the dream of someday, somehow, getting Home.
Frederick Buechner
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In other words to live Eternal Life in the full and final sense is to be with God as Christ is with him, and with each other as Christ is with us.
Frederick Buechner
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If you have never known the power of God's love, then maybe it is because you have never asked to know it - I mean really asked, expecting an answer.
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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...words are not only meaning but music and magic and power.
Frederick Buechner
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To be bored is to turn a cold shoulder to engage all that God is and has for you in the moment.
Frederick Buechner
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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
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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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In honesty you have to admit to a wise man that prayer is not for the wise, not for the prudent, not for the sophisticated. Instead it is for those who recognize that in face of their deepest needs, all their wisdom is quite helpless. It is for those who are willing to persist in doing something that is both childish and crucial.
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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Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom, the good thief said from his cross (Luke 23:42). There are perhaps no more human words in all of Scripture, no prayer we can pray so well.
Frederick Buechner
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Coincidences are God's way of getting our attention.
Frederick Buechner
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I believe with the best of who I am in God, but I sometimes think if anybody would watch me and [they] didn't believe a damn thing, they would have a very hard time deciding which of us is which.
Frederick Buechner
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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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At the evening of our day, we shall be judged by our loving.
Frederick Buechner
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Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention.
Frederick Buechner
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Grace is something you can never get but can only be given. There's no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about anymore than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or earn good looks. A good night's sleep is grace and so are good dreams. Most tears are grace. The smell of rain is grace. Somebody loving you is grace.
Frederick Buechner
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Wether you call on him or don't call on him, God will be present with you.
Frederick Buechner