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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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Frederick Buechner
Age: 98
Born: 1926
Born: July 11
Autobiographer
Novelist
Poet
Theologian
Writer
New York City
New York
Carl Frederick Buechner
Anything
Approaching
Way
Funeral
Thinking
Buried
People
Birthday
Lasts
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Inscribed
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Funerals
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Tombstone

More quotes by Frederick Buechner

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Your vocation lies in the intersection of the world's deep need and your deep joy.
Frederick Buechner
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Remember me not for the ill I've done but for the good I've dreamed.
Frederick Buechner
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God himself does not give answers. He gives himself.
Frederick Buechner
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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
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Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.
Frederick Buechner
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Coincidences are God's way of getting our attention.
Frederick Buechner
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Five friends I had and two of them snakes.
Frederick Buechner
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To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift.
Frederick Buechner
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To believe in Christ is to give your heart to Christ, which means not to affirm things about Christ, but it's like what you mean when you say, I believe in my friend.
Frederick Buechner
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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
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The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.
Frederick Buechner
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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
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We must be careful with our lives, for Christ's sake, because it would seem that they are the only lives we are going to have in this puzzling and perilous world, and so they are very precious and what we do with them matters enormously.
Frederick Buechner
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If you are going to proclaim the Christian faith, speak about those dimensions of it which you['ve] had some experience with.
Frederick Buechner
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No words come easily to my lips. I think ultimately - what I like to think is that I'm in some sense hearing the mystery itself.
Frederick Buechner
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Speak in your own voice and speak about things that you have in some sense witnessed, not just things you read about or have been taught about in seminary. To talk about the resurrection, think about those moments where in some way you have been resurrected.
Frederick Buechner
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If it seems a childish thing to do, do it in remembrance that you are a child.
Frederick Buechner
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Despair has been called the unforgivable sin-not presumably because God refuses to forgive it, but because it despairs of the possibility of being forgiven.
Frederick Buechner
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Grace is something you can never get but only be given.
Frederick Buechner
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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