40 Quotes from Frederick Buechner (1926-2022)

Carl Frederick Buechner (1926) was an American author, Presbyterian minister, and theologian who died in 2022 at the age of 96. Why should you be interested in him?  Because he left behind a legacy of profound biblical wisdom — and many excellent quotes that will inspire and encourage you to live life.

A Life-Changing Event

In the fall of 1936, when Buechner was 10, he and his younger brother were playing in their room. His father looked in on them, then went to the garage, got into his car, and turned it on, leaving the garage door closed.  The exhaust fumes killed him.  

The two boys heard a commotion outside. Looking out the window, they saw their father lying on the driveway.  Their mother and grandmother had dragged him from the garage and were attempting to revive him. But they were not successful.

Sadly, there was no funeral and no discussion about their father’s suicide. The boy’s mother moved them to Bermuda, and the family rules became, “Don’t talk, don’t trust, don’t feel.”  They were told to hide their sadness, forget their pain, and suffer silently and alone.

Buechner Chose a Different Path

Buechner chose to be transformed by the power of life rather than hardening himself to the pain of death. In his career that spanned six decades, he wrote 39 books, including “The Sacred Journey,” “The Longing for Home,” “Telling Secrets,” and “The Eyes of the Heart.” In his books, he shared the details of his experience, the depths of his pain, and the power of life he found beyond it. Of death, he wrote, 

“What’s lost is nothing to what’s found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.”

In his mid-20s, and after his first two novels, A Long Day’s Dying (1950) and The Seasons’ Difference (1952), Buechner came to faith in Jesus.  It was at a church service in New York where the pastor talked about how Jesus is crowned amid confession, tears, and great laughter.

“At the phrase great laughter, for reasons that I have never satisfactorily understood, the great wall of China crumbled, and Atlantis rose up out of the sea, and on Madison Avenue, at 73rd Street, tears leapt from my eyes as though I had been struck across the face.”

Buechner’s faith has been described as personal, unpretentious, and accessible. His many quotes reveal such.

“Faith is not being sure where you’re going, but going anyway. [It] is stepping out into the unknown with nothing to guide us but a hand just beyond our grasp.

Faith is the assurance that the best and holiest dream is true after all.

Buechner’s desire was to help others find the fullness of life in the midst and the legacy of pain and suffering.

 “What’s lost is nothing to what’s found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.”

“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.”

My Favorite Frederick Buechner Quotes

“Resurrection means that the worst thing is never the last thing”

“The worst isn’t the last thing about the world. It’s the next to the last thing. The last thing is the best. It’s the power from on high that comes down into the world and wells up from the rock-bottom worst of the world like a hidden spring. Can you believe it? The last, best thing is the laughing deep in the hearts of the saints, sometimes our hearts even. Yes. You are terribly loved and forgiven. Yes. You are healed. All is well. “

40 More Quotes from Frederick Buechner

1. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.
2. Your vocation in life is where your greatest joy meets the world’s greatest need.
3. One life on this earth is all that we get, whether it is enough or not enough, and the obvious conclusion would seem to be that at the very least we are fools if we do not live it as fully and bravely and beautifully as we can. 
4. The birth of Jesus made possible not just a new way of understanding life but a new way of living it. 
5. Pay attention to the things that bring a tear to your eye or a lump in your throat because they are signs that the holy is drawing near.
6. Life is grace. Sleep is forgiveness. The night absolves. Darkness wipes the slate clean, not spotless to be sure, but clean enough for another day’s chalking. 
7. Grace is something you can never get but only be given.
8. Faith is not being sure where you’re going but going anyway. A journey without maps. 
9. Faith in God is less apt to proceed from miracles than miracles from faith in God.
10. Justice is the grammar of things. Mercy is the poetry of things. God himself does not give answers. He gives himself. 
11. [Prayer is] reaching for a hand you cannot touch.
12. Love is, in the Christian sense, not primarily an emotion but an act of the will. 
13. Joy is a mystery because it can happen anywhere, anytime, even under the most unpromising circumstances, even in the midst of suffering, with tears in its eyes. 
14. 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.
15. When Jesus tells us to love our neighbors, he is not telling us to love them in the sense of responding to them with a cozy emotional feeling. You can as well produce a cozy emotional feeling as you can a cough or sneeze. On the contrary, he is telling us to love our neighbors in the sense of being willing to work for their well-being even if it means sacrificing our well-being to that end.
16. The world says, The more you take, the more you have. Christ says, the more you give, the more you are.
17. Coincidences are God’s way of getting our attention. In other words to live Eternal Life in the full and final sense is to be with God as Christ is with him, and with each other as Christ is with us.
18. It is not the objective proof of God’s existence that we want but the experience of God’s presence. That is the miracle we are really after, and that is also, I think, the miracle that we really get.
19. Words spoken in deep love or deep hate set things in motion in the human heart that can never be reversed.
20. The pride that keeps us from forgiving is the same pride which keeps us from accepting forgiveness.
21. Turn around and believe that the good news that we are loved is better than we ever dared hope, and that to believe in that good news, to live out of it and toward it, to be in love with that good news, is of all glad things in this world the gladdest thing of all. Amen, and come Lord Jesus. 
22. ON HER DEATHBED, Gertrude Stein is said to have asked, ‘What is the answer?’ Then, after a long silence, ‘What is the question?’ Don’t start looking in the Bible for the answers it gives. Start by listening for the questions it asks.
23. Jesus doesn’t say, “The religion founded in my name is the way, the truth, and the life, [and] what people say about me is the way.” “Our way of worship, the Christian structure, is not the way,” [he would say,] “I am. I am. If you want to know what life is all about, what it’s supposed to be, where it’s supposed to go, where it’s supposed to derive its strength from, don’t look at anything people say about me. Don’t look at the faith that’s been created. Look at my life, which is a life ultimately of sacrificial love.”
24. When [our secrets] are sad and hurtful secrets, like my father’s death, we can in a way honor the hurt by letting ourselves feel it as we never let ourselves feel it before, and then, having felt it, by laying it aside; we can start to take care of ourselves the way we take care of people we love.  The fearsome blessing of that hard time continues to work itself out in my life in the same way we’re told the universe is still hurtling through outer space under the impact of the great cosmic explosion…. I think grace sometimes explodes into our lives like that-sending our pain, terror, astonishment hurtling through inner space until by grace they become Orion, Cassiopeia, Polaris to give us our bearings, to bring us into something like full being at last.
25. Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention. They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are but, more often than not, God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go to next. 
26. People are disturbed not by things but by the view they take of them. They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.
27. What deadens us most to God’s presence within us, I think, is the inner dialogue that we are continually engaged in with ourselves, the endless chatter of human thought. 
28. Even the saddest things can become, once we have made peace with them, a source of wisdom and strength. 
29. Not to love is, psychically, spiritually, to die. To live for yourself alone, hoarding your life for your own sake, is in almost every sense that matters to reduce your life to a life hardly worth the living, and thus to lose it. 
30. Thus, when you wake up in the morning, called by God to be a self again, if you want to know who you are, watch your feet. Because where your feet take you, that is who you are. 
31. God created us in joy and created us for joy, and in the long run not all the darkness there is in the world and in ourselves can separate us finally from that joy, because whatever else it means to say that God created us in His image, I think it means that even when we cannot believe in Him, even when we feel most spiritually bankrupt and deserted by Him, His mark is deep within us. We have God’s joy in our blood.
32. Much as we wish, not one of us can bring back yesterday or shape tomorrow. Only today is ours, and it will not be ours for long, and once it is gone it will never in all time be ours again. Thou only knowest what it holds in store for us, yet even we know something of what it will hold. The chance to speak the truth, to show mercy, to ease another’s burden. The chance to resist evil, to remember all the good times and good people of our past, to be brave, to be strong, to be glad.
33. Avarice, greed, concupiscence and so forth are all based on the mathematical truism that the more you get, the more you have. The remark of that it is more blessed to give than to receive is based on the human truth that the more you give away in love, the more you are. It is not just for the sake of other people that tells us to give rather than get, but for our own sakes too. 
34. You can’t be too careful what you tell a child because you never know what he’ll take hold of and spend the rest of his life remembering you by. 
35. You can never be sure whether you are discovering the truth or inventing it. [editor: unless, of course, you are discovering truth in the Bible]
36. To be wise is to be eternally curious. 
37. Don’t let your life just go in one eye and out the other. The trouble with really seeing and really hearing is that then we really have to do something about what we have seen and heard. 
38. My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours. 
39. The magic of words is that they have power to do more than convey meaning; not only do they have the power to make things clear, they make things happen.
40. If our pain doesn’t destroy us, it just might transform us into truly human beings at last. 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.