Inspirational Quotes by Frederick Buechner

“The reason I was so at peace in that room, I think, is that in it I remembered back before time and beyond space to the day when God in his glory made us and the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy. By quieting our minds and keeping still, by praying less in words perhaps than in images, maybe most of all by just letting up on ourselves and letting go, I think we can begin to put ourselves back in touch with that glory and joy we come from and begin moving out of the shadows toward something more like light.”

“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.”

“a rule that I had no less devastatingly laid down for myself, and it was this: that I had no right to be happy unless the people I loved - especially my children - were happy too. I have come to believe that is not true. I believe instead that we all of us have not only the right to be happy no matter what but also a kind of sacred commission to be happy - in the sense of being free to breathe and move, in the sense of being able to bless our own lives, even the sad times of our own lives, because through all our times we can learn and grow, and through all our times, if we keep our ears open, God speaks to us his saving word. Then by drawing on all those times we have had, we can sometimes even speak and live a saving word to the saving of others.”

“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.”

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

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

“And then, of course, there are the other servants who put their money out to earn interest, whom the master calls good and faithful servants. Faithful, as if their goodness is their faithfulness. They somehow—despite the fact that the master was a hard master, despite the fact that God makes impossible demands of us or terrible demands of us: to be perfect, to be loving, to be open—have faith in him that somehow all will be well; that it’s worth taking the risk, even if you live your life and it doesn’t turn out the way you want. There is forgiveness. There is compassion. There is mercy in God. And therefore, you dare take your chances and do what you can do with the hand that life, or God, has dealt you.”

“I told this story to a group in Texas once, and afterward the retreat leader came up to me and said, “You’ve had a good deal of pain in your life,” which, of course, he could’ve said to any one of us. And he said, “You’ve been a good steward of it. You’ve been a good steward of your pain.” That caught me absolutely off balance. I’ve never heard that before. Steward has always been a boring, churchy word to me, you know? Stewardship Sunday or something like that. It’s about taking care of your money, probably. But to be a steward of your pain, what a marvelous idea. I’ve thought a great deal about it ever since—what it means to be a steward of your pain, the various ways in which we deal with the sad and puzzling things that happen to us over the course of our lives.”

“When my daughter was dying, in effect, in this hospital on the west coast, I had never lived through a time when, in any obvious way, God seemed more distant. This girl reduced to a concentration camp victim, her arms and legs such sticks, her lovely young face such a death head that when we came upon her in the hospital that first night after we arrived, I literally would not have known it was my daughter. It was a horrifying, terrifying time. Which might well have given rise to the sense of, “If there is a God, what in hell is going on? How does this kind of thing get to happen?” But instead, by grace, I had this overpowering kind of comfort. God was silent. He said nothing I could hear; he did nothing I could see. But I had this tremendous sense that he was doing all he could do without blowing the whole show sky-high.”

“Another way, I think, is to be somehow trapped by your pain. Being stopped in your tracks. Never, in a sense, being able to escape your pain. Never being able to move on out of it into whatever lies beyond. I think a classic example of that would be the character Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. Miss Havisham was at an early age all set to be married. She had on her bridal finery, and the great wedding cake was there in the parlor. Then her boyfriend jilted her, and that was the end of her life. From that day on, she lived in that room, wearing her tattered, moldering wedding clothes, with the cake still there, a sort of ruined pile on the table with cobwebs and mice. And I think I’ve known people like that, who have been somehow trapped in their pain. It becomes their confinement. It becomes like the room to the cricket—it can’t get out of it. You keep living it over and over and over again, almost relishing the bitterness of it. So you deal with your pain by allowing it to overwhelm you, by allowing it to stop you in your tracks. And I suppose it’s also a way of surviving your pain, because as in the case of Miss Havisham, you take a kind of grim, awful pleasure in your ruin.”

“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?”

“Sloth is getting through life on automatic pilot. Not really being alive. Not really making use of what happens to you. Burying what you might have made something out of. Playing it safe with your life. To bury your life, to bury your pain, to bury your joy. To bury whatever it is that the world gives you, and then live as carefully as you can without really living at all. And I think that when the master speaks of being cast into darkness, whether it was wailing and gnashing of teeth, it’s not so much that he’s saying, “I’m going to punish you by casting you into the darkness where you will wail and gnash your teeth,” but, “To live a buried life is to say you have not really lived your life at all.”

“So generally—and this is not a complicated point, God knows—the arts frame our life for us so that we will experience it. Pay attention to it.”

“And then the ultimate word of judgment that the master speaks is, “From him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” This from, you must remember, the Prince of Peace, the Good Shepherd. From him who has not, even what he has will be taken. That seems the ultimate injustice, to take away the one talent from a man who has only one talent and give it to the other ones. I take that to mean, again, not a punishment so much as the inevitable consequence of burying your life. If you bury your life—if you don’t face, among other things, your pain—your life shrinks. It is in a way diminished. It is in a way taken away.”

“It seems to me almost before the Bible says anything else, it is saying that—how important it is to be alive and to pay attention to being alive, pay attention to each other, pay attention to God as he moves and as he speaks. Pay attention to where life or God has tried to take you.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The faces we lose track of most easily are the faces of the people who are closest to us, the people we love the most whose faces we see so often that we can't really see them anymore.”

“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.”

“Your father lies beneath a stone,' old Aedwen mumbles, dozing at her wheel, and Godric thinks how it's a stone as well they're all beneath. The stone is need and hurt and gall and tongue-tied longing, for that's the stone that kinship always bears, yet the loss of it would press more grievous still.”