Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Frederick Buechner
Age: 98
Born: 1926
Born: July 11
Autobiographer
Novelist
Poet
Theologian
Writer
New York City
New York
Carl Frederick Buechner
Inside
Creative
Past
Character
Fictional
Trying
Search
Going
Deeply
World
Characters
Listen

More quotes by Frederick Buechner

Image
Pay mind to your own life, your own health, and wholeness. A bleeding heart is of no help to anyone if it bleeds to death.
Frederick Buechner
Image
If preachers decide to preach about hope, let them preach out of what they themselves hope for.
Frederick Buechner
Image
When someone we love suffers, we suffer with that person, and we would not have it otherwise, because the suffering and the love are one, just as it is with God's love for us.
Frederick Buechner
Image
Prayers out of, very often, not the most religious part of me, but the most anxious part of me, the most desperately loving, fearing part of me.
Frederick Buechner
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Beneath the worst the world can do, there is always the glimmer of the best.
Frederick Buechner
Image
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
Image
Thus, when you wake up in the morning, called by God to be a self again, if you want to know who you are, watch your feet. Because where your feet take you, that is who you are.
Frederick Buechner
Image
Justice is the grammar of things. Mercy is the poetry of things.
Frederick Buechner
Image
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
Image
We have God's joy in our blood.
Frederick Buechner
Image
Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.
Frederick Buechner
Image
We find by losing. We hold fast by letting go. We become something new by ceasing to be something old.
Frederick Buechner
Image
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
Image
To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift.
Frederick Buechner
Image
You can never be sure whether you are discovering the truth or inventing it.
Frederick Buechner
Image
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
Image
Toleration is often just indifference in disguise.
Frederick Buechner
Image
. . . [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