Quotes from Frederick Buechner

Because all peddlers of God's word have that in common, I think: they tell what costs them least to tell and what will gain them most; and to tell the story of who we really are and of the battle between light and dark, between belief and unbelief, between sin and grace that is waged within us all costs plenty and may not gain us anything, we're afraid, but an uneasy silence and a fishy stare.

Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated, The bird of dawning singeth all night long; And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad, The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike, No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm, So hallowed and so gracious is the time.

We're all, by and large, comparatively speaking, rich people and have perhaps more than one home. And yet the question is, are we really at home anywhere? Are we really at home in any of our homes? Because it seems to me that to be at home somewhere means to be at peace somewhere and I have a feeling at some deep level there can really be no peace for any of us, no real home for any of us, until there is some measure of real peace for everybody until everybody has a home.

Frivolous they might be, but the people of Ecbatana at least saw that the world was created for their delight, and as they jumped about in the frigid streams and wasted their money in the crowded bazaars, they came closer to living their lives as the Holy One intended than those who were continually apologizing for their unworthiness and trying to avert the wrath of the One who, had they but known, wishes the world only well.

Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets. All these also did not receive what was promised but greeted it from afar, and then there are all those who did not much believe in the promise to begin with, and it is not always possible to tell the two apart.

To find our calling is to find the intersection between our own deep gladness and the world's deep hunger.

again—"Are you going home for Christmas?"—and asked it in some sort of way that brought tears to my eyes and made it almost unnecessary for him to move on to his answer to the question, which was that home, finally, is the manger in Bethlehem, the place where at midnight even the oxen kneel.

RELIGION AS A word points to that area of human experience where in one way or another man comes upon mystery as a summons to pilgrimage; where he senses meanings no less overwhelming because they can be only hinted at in myth and ritual; where he glimpses a destination that he can never know fully until he reaches it.

Is it true, what Jesus believed, this Truth that he died for and lived for? Maybe the only way to know finally this side of falling off that precipice ourselves is to stop speaking and thinking and reading about it so much and to start watching and listening.

Or I think of breathing - the body in its wisdom taking its sustenance out of the air even when the conscious mind, the will, the hunger both for life and for death, are asleep. I think of the breathing of one who is asleep, how suddenly in some dark passage of the night the breathing becomes a word, the dreamer speaks, and through his word the fragment of a dream passes from inner world to outer world. The visible effects of the invisible manifest themselves.

The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.

If it seems a childish thing to do, do it in remembrance that you are a child.

I don't know how to save my own life, so anything they've found in what I've written that saved theirs - I can't take responsibility for it.

Wherever people love each other and are true to each other and take risks for each other, God is with them and for them and they are doing God's will.

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.

I'm a hopeless prayer. I think somewhere in there I spend a great deal of time at it.

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.

Words spoken in deep love or deep hate set things in motion in the human heart that can never be reversed.

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

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

Religion points to that area of human experience where in one way or another man comes upon mystery as a summons to pilgrimage.

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.

Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else's skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.

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. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It's for you I created the universe. I love you. There's only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you'll reach out and take it. Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too.