Frederick Buechner
Frederick Buechner
Carl Frederick Buechneris an American writer and theologian. He is an ordained Presbyterian minister and the author of more than thirty published books. His work encompasses different genres, including fiction, autobiography, essays and sermons, and his career has spanned six decades. Buechner's books have been translated into many languages for publication around the world. He is best known for his works A Long Day's Dying; The Book of Bebb, a tetralogy based on the character Leo Bebb published in 1979;...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth11 July 1926
CountryUnited States of America
Frederick Buechner quotes about
Beneath the worst the world can do, there is always the glimmer of the best.
The pride that keeps us from forgiving is the same pride which keeps us from accepting forgiveness.
In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints.
When a child is born, a father is born. A mother is born, too of course, but at least for her it's a gradual process. Body and soul, she has nine months to get used to what's happening. She becomes what's happening. But for even the best-prepared father, it happens all at once. On the other side of a plate-glass window, a nurse is holding up something roughly the size of a loaf of bread for him to see for the first time.
. . . [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.
There is no event so common place but that God is present within it, always hidden, always leaving you room to recognize Him or not to recognize Him.
Here and there and not just in books we catch glimpses of a world of once upon a time and they lived happily ever after, of a world where there is a wizard to give courage and a heart, an angel with a white stone that has written on it our true and secret name, and it is so easy to dismiss it all that it is hardly worth bothering to do. ... But if the world of the fairy tale and our glimpses of it here and there are only a dream, they are one of the most haunting and powerful dreams that the world has ever dreamed...
To be bored to death is a form of suicide.
The world speaks of holy things in the only language it knows, which is worldly language.
Wether you call on him or don't call on him, God will be present with you.
Listen. Your life is happening. You are happening. Think back on your journey. The music of your life...
They are prepared for a God who strikes hard bargains but not for a God who gives as much for an hour's work as for a day's. They are prepared for a mustard-seed kingdom of God no bigger than the eye of a newt but not for the great banyan it becomes with birds in its branches singing Mozart. They are prepared for the potluck supper at First Presbyterian but not for the marriage supper of the lamb...
Without somehow destroying me in the process, how could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there were no room for doubt, there would be no room for me.
Words spoken in deep love or deep hate set things in motion in the human heart that can never be reversed.