Quotes by Frederick Buechner

There is a fragrance in the air, a certain passage of a song, an old photograph falling out from the pages of a book, the sound of somebodys voice in the hall that makes your heart leap and fills your eyes with tears. Who can say when or how it will be that something easters up out of the dimness to remind us of a time before we were born and after we will die?

From the simplest lyric to the most complex novel, literature is asking us to pay attention. Pay attention to the frog. Pay attention to the west wind. Pay attention to the boy on the raft, the lady on the tower, the old man on the train. In sum, pay attention to the world and all that dwells therein and thereby learn at last to pay attention to yourself and all that dwells therein.

And because Gods love is uncoercive and treasures our freedom - if above all he wants us to love him, then we must be left free not to love him - we are free to resist it, deny it, crucify it finally, which we do again and again. This is our terrible freedom, which love refuses to overpower so that, in this, the greatest of all powers, Gods power, is itself powerless.

You use your real voice with those you love, and you cannot be phony with those who know you well.

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

Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody elses 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.

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.

“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.”