Quotes from Frederick Buechner

Be merciful to yourself, stop fighting yourself quite so much. Maybe what you are asking of yourself, what you're driving yourself to do or to be, what you put a gun to your own back to make yourself do, is something at this point you needn't have to think about doing. So, think back at the end of the day to the wars you're involved in. How are they going?

At least for a moment we all saw, I think, that the danger of pluralism is that it becomes factionalism, and that if factions grind their separate axes too vociferously, something mutual, precious, and human is in danger of being drowned out and lost.

The real turning point in human history is less apt to be the day the wheel is invented or Rome falls than the day a boy is born to a couple of hick Jews.

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

And it seems to me the world is a manger, the whole bloody mess of it, where God is being born again and again and again and again and again and again. You've got your mind on so many other things. You are so busy with this and that, you don't see it. You don't notice it.

To love your neighbor is to see your neighbor. To see somebody, really to see somebody, you have to love somebody.

Vocation is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.

Listen to your life. Listen to what happens to you because it is through what happens to you that God speaks... It's in language that's not always easy to decipher, but it's there, powerfully, memorably, unforgettably.

In winter when the snow and ice were fierce, we shook beneath our different roofs alone, and that's what Hell is like, I think. It's cold and shame and shaking. And worst of all, it's loneliness.

The Kingdom of God is where we belong. It is home, and whether we realize it or not, I think we are all of us homesick for it. -Originally published in The Clown in the Belfry and later in Secrets in the Dark

I'll tell you this. I've labored all my life. I've baked and brewed. I've woven, spun, and dyed. I've kept my husband's house and raised his young. And many other things besides. So where was time for holiness? What strength was left for faith? Let monks and nuns and priests have care of that. The dead shall rise? The Lord himself will sit as justicer in manor court? It may be true for all I know. But in the meanwhile bread, beer, work, and rest at night, they're truth enough for me.

Lying to God is like sawing the branch you're sitting on. The better you do it, the harder you fall.

The decisive war is the other one - to become fully human, which means to become compassionate, honest, brave. And this is a war against the darkness which no man fights alone.

A GLUTTON IS ONE who raids the icebox for a cure for spiritual malnutrition.

We are commanded to love our neighbors as ourselves, and I believe that to love ourselves means to extend to those various selves that we have been along the way the same degree of compassion and concern that we would extend to anyone else.

The sadness was I'd lost a father I had never fully found. It's like a tune that ends before you've heard it out. Your whole life through you search to catch the strain, and seek the face you've lost in strangers' faces.

Podes despedir-te da tua família e dos teus amigos e afastar-te milhares de quilómetros, mas, ao mesmo tempo, leva-los no teu coração, na tua mente, no teu estomâgo, pois não só vives no mundo, mas o mundo vive em ti

We try to fend off this world we yearn for where men live together as brothers because there is something in each of us that wants to live not for his brother but for himself. We fend it off because we know in our terrible wisdom that the price we must pay for it is death, the death of self and all the values of self, the death that must take place before the life can come.

Payattention.  As a summation of all that I have had to say as a writer, I would settle for that.  And as a talisman or motto for that journey in search of a homeland, which is what faith is, I would settle for that too.

But when melody wells up in thrushes' throats, and bees buzz honeysong, and rock and river clap like hands in summer sun, then misery's drowned in minstrelsy, and Godric's glad in spite of all. Yet sometimes too he's sad in spite of all, God knows, for there are other voices than the poor's.

It will be no ordinary birth but a virgin birth because the birth of righteousness and love in this stern world is always a virgin birth. It is never men nor the nations of men nor all the power and wisdom of men that bring it forth but always God, and that is why the angel says, 'The child to be born will be called the Son of God.

UNBELIEF IS AS much of a choice as belief is. What makes it in many ways more appealing is that whereas to believe in something requires some measure of understanding and effort, not to believe doesn't require much of anything at all.

life without death has become as unthinkable to me as day without night or waking without sleep.

The power of God stands in violent contrast with the power of man. It is not external like man's power, but internal. By applying external pressure, I can make a person do what I want him to do. This is man's power. But as for making him be what I want him to be, without at the same time destroying his freedom, only love can make this happen.