Frederick Buechner Quotes

I find I need to put things into words before I can believe that they are entirely real.

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.

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.

The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.

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.

To be commanded to love God at all, let alone in the wilderness, is like being commanded to be well when we are sick, to sing for joy when we are dying of thirst, to run when our legs are broken. But this is the first and great commandment nonetheless. Even in the wilderness - especially in the wilderness - you shall love him.

The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you.

Lord, I believe; help my unbelief' is the best any of us can do really, but thank God it is enough.

Like Adam, we have all lost Paradise; and yet we carry Paradise around inside of us in the form of a longing for, almost a memory of, a blessedness that is no more, or the dream of a blessedness that may someday be again.

It is not objective proof of God's existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God's presence.

Turn around and believe that the good news that we are loved is better than we ever dared hope, and that to believe in that good news, to live out of it and toward it, to be in love with that good news, is of all glad things in this world the gladdest thing of all. Amen, and come Lord Jesus.

Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.

And now brothers, I will ask you a terrible question, and God knows I ask it also of myself. Is the truth beyond all truths, beyond the stars, just this: that to live without him is the real death, that to die with him the only life?

There is always the poet, the lunatic, the lover; there is always the religious man who is a queer mixture of the three.

Our father. We have killed him, and we will kill him again, and our world will kill him. And yet he is there. It is he who listens at the door. It is he who is coming. It is our father who is about to be born. Through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Go where your best prayers take you.

Faith is stepping out into the unknown with nothing to guide us but a hand just beyond our grasp.

Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.

For outlandish creatures like us, on our way to a heart, a brain, and courage, Bethlehem is not the end of our journey but only the beginning - not home but the place through which we must pass if ever we are to reach home at last.

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.