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 somebody’s 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?

– Frederick Buechner – Telling the Truth

The original, shimmering self gets buried so deep that most of us end up hardly living out of it at all. Instead we live out all the other selves, which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world’s weather

– Frederick Buechner – Telling Secrets

. . some moment happens in your life that you say yes right up to the roots of your hair, that makes it worth having been born just to have happened.

… if you throw your arms around such a moment and hug it like crazy, it may save your soul.

– Frederick Buechner –

I not only have my secrets, I am my secrets. And you are yours. Our secrets are human secrets, and our trusting each other enough to share them with each other has much to do with the secret of what it means to be human.

– Frederick Buechner –

It is a world of magic and mystery, of deep darkness and flickering starlight. It is a world where terrible things happen and wonderful things too…

It is a world where often it is hard to be sure who belongs to which side because appearances are endlessly deceptive.

– Frederick Buechner –

Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to … hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.

– Frederick Buechner –