Latest Frederick Buechner Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• Speak in your own voice and speak about things that you have in some sense witnessed, not just things you read about or have been taught about in seminary. To talk about the resurrection, think about those moments where in some way you have been resurrected.

  Frederick Buechner

  Thinking, Voice, Way

  Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

• If you talk about sin, you don't have to use the first person singular, but speak out of that part of yourself which knows what it means to become estranged from people you love. Speak in your own voice about things that you in your own life have in one way or another experienced.

  Frederick Buechner

  Mean, Speaks Out, Voice

  Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

• If you are going to proclaim the Christian faith, speak about those dimensions of it which you['ve] had some experience with.

  Frederick Buechner

  Christian, Dimensions, Speak

  Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

• The world needs people who save lives.

  Frederick Buechner

  People, Needs, World

  Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

• Preaching and writing - it's the same. Whether I'm writing to speak or writing to be read in a book, it's the same thing.

  Frederick Buechner

  Book, Writing, Speak

  Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

• I don't know how to save my own life, so anything they've found in what I've written that saved theirs - I can't take responsibility for it.

  Frederick Buechner

  Responsibility, Found, Know How

  Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

• What makes you, in the deepest sense of the word, happy? That's what you should be doing, if the other part is also met - if it is something the world needs.

  Frederick Buechner

  Needs, World, Should

  Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

• If what makes you happy is going out and living it up and spending all your money on wine, women, and song, the world doesn't need that. But on the other hand, if you give your life to good works - you go and work in a leper colony and it doesn't make you happy - the chances are you're not doing it very well.

  Frederick Buechner

  Song, Wine, Hands

  Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

• I was deeply influenced by an Episcopal laywoman named Agnes Sanford, who in her day was quite famous as a faith healer, which is a term I've always distrusted, because it conjures up charlatanry. She was not a charlatan. She was the real thing, and she had had remarkable healings.

  Frederick Buechner

  Real, Healing, Remarkable

  Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

• Pray anyway. Who knows what God can do through your prayer?

  Frederick Buechner

  Prayer, Praying, Knows

  Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

• I say, “You may be right, but don’t knock it until you’re tried it. Don’t say, ‘I think it’s worthless; therefore I’m not going to spend any time looking into myself the way one who prays does.'” Maybe that’s an even worse mistake than praying might be.

  Frederick Buechner

  Mistake, Doe, Might

  Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

• Prayers out of, very often, not the most religious part of me, but the most anxious part of me, the most desperately loving, fearing part of me.

  Frederick Buechner

  Religious, Prayer, Anxious

  Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

• I'm a hopeless prayer. I think somewhere in there I spend a great deal of time at it.

  Frederick Buechner

  Thinking, Hopeless, Praying

  Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

• My prayer is spasmodic, occasional, desperate. It has a great deal to do with my children's physical well-being - that when they're traveling in the air the plane not crash, things like that.

  Frederick Buechner

  Prayer, Children, Air

  Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

• I pray for people I love when they are sick. I pray that way.

  Frederick Buechner

  People, Sick, Way

  Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

• What gets me back to church, I think, is thinking maybe this time that question "Is it true?" will be answered, not just in terms of somebody saying, "Yes, it's true," but something will happen in a sermon or maybe shuffling up to the Eucharist, or in the old lady who's sitting beside me with a Bible - maybe something will happen which will show me that it's true. So I go back thinking, maybe this time I'll be lucky.

  Frederick Buechner

  Thinking, Church, Saying Yes

  Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

• The preaching is part of the reason I don't go to church. Plus, I don't know, it was never part of my tradition.

  Frederick Buechner

  Church, Tradition, Reason

  Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

• For some people, going to church is going home. In a very profound sense, I would say the same thing. Home is where Christ is.

  Frederick Buechner

  Home, People, Profound

  Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

• People will buy snake oil from anybody who seems to be selling it in a persuasive way.

  Frederick Buechner

  Snakes, Oil, People

  Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

• I am such a person of words. I've spent so much of my life trying to get it right, say it right, say it eloquently, say it truthfully, say it honestly, that when I hear it said in ways that none of those adverbs would describe I find myself so repelled that it almost shuts my mind off.

  Frederick Buechner

  Mind, Trying, Way

  Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

• In New England, especially, [faith] is like sex. It's very personal. You don't bring it out and talk about it.

  Frederick Buechner

  Sex, England, New England

  Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

• I think most people, if I asked, would say, "Yes, of course I believe." But I think for a great many of them it doesn't really make much difference in terms of either what they do with their lives or with their own inner well-being. They believe because so did grandfather, and that's the same church they've been going to all these years.

  Frederick Buechner

  Believe, Thinking, Differences

  Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

• It's all so verbal in the Protestant church. You've heard these words a million times before. Maybe people are leaving the church because they find the church has nothing that they're looking for.

  Frederick Buechner

  People, Leaving, Church

  Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

• I believe with the best of who I am in God, but I sometimes think if anybody would watch me and [they] didn't believe a damn thing, they would have a very hard time deciding which of us is which.

  Frederick Buechner

  Believe, Thinking, Hard Times

  Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

• I don't go to church all that regularly, and one reason I don't is very often when I go I am bored out of my wits. I find myself being addressed by preachers who, I assume, were led by some initial passion for Christ, for the truth, for God, for "the More." That's what got them there. But that has gotten buried under all the debris of having to run a church, of concerns.

  Frederick Buechner

  Running, Passion, Bored

  Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.