Telling Secrets Quotes

“Stop trying to protect, to rescue, to judge, to manage the lives around you . . . remember that the lives of others are not your business. They are their business. They are God’s business . . . even your own life is not your business. It also is God’s business. Leave it to God. It is an astonishing thought. It can become a life-transforming thought . . . unclench the fists of your spirit and take it easy . . . What deadens us most to God’s presence within us, I think, is the inner dialogue that we are continuously engaged in with ourselves, the endless chatter of human thought. I suspect that there is nothing more crucial to true spiritual comfort . . . than being able from time to time to stop that chatter . . . ”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister

“What we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else. It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are . . . because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier . . . for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own . . . ”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister

“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: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister

“I have come to believe that by and large the human family all has the same secrets, which are both very telling and very important to tell. They are telling in the sense that they tell what is perhaps the central paradox of our condition—that what we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else. It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are—even if we tell it only to ourselves—because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier that way to see where we have been in our lives and where we are going. It also makes it easier for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own, and exchanges like that have a lot to do with what being a family is all about and what being human is all about.”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister

“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… it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known to each of us more powerfully and personally. If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but also spiritually.”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister

“I believe that what Genesis suggests is that this original self, with the print of God's thumb still upon it, is the most essential part of who we are and is buried deep in all of us as a source of wisdom and strength and healing which we can draw upon or, with our terrible freedom, not draw upon as we choose. I think that among other things all real art comes from that deepest self - painting, writing music, dance, all of it that in some way nourishes the spirit. ”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister

“Love yourself not in some egocentric, self-serving sense but love yourself the way you would love your friend in the sense of taking care of yourself, nourishing yourself, trying to understand, comfort, and strengthen yourself.”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister

“You have to suffer in order to be beautiful.”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister

“If writers write not just with paper and ink or a word processor but with their own life's blood, then I think something like this is perhaps always the case. A book you write out of the depths of who you are, like a dream you dream out of those same depths, is entirely your own creation. All the words your characters speak are words that you alone have put into their mouths, just as every situation they become involved in is one that you alone have concocted for them. But it seems to me that nonetheless that a book you write, like a dream you dream, can have more healing and truth and wisdom in it at least for yourself than you feel in any way responsible for.”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister

“The passage from Genesis points to a mystery greater still. It says that we came from farther away than space and longer ago than time. It says that evolution and genetics and environment explain a lot about us but they don’t explain all about us or even the most important thing about us. It says that though we live in the world, we can never really be at home in the world. It says in short not only that we were created by God but also that we were created in God’s image and likeness. We have something of God within us the way we have something of the stars.”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister

“Life batters and shapes us in all sorts of ways before it's done, but those original selves which we were born with, and which I believe we continue in some measure to be no matter what, are selves which still echo with the holiness of their origin. I believe that what Genesis suggests is that this original self, with the print of God's thumb still upon it, is the most essential part of who we are and is buried deep in all of us as a source of wisdom and strength and healing which we can draw upon or, with our terrible freedom, not draw upon as we choose. I think that among other things all real art comes from that deepest self – painting, writing music, dance, all of it that in some way nourishes the spirit and enriches the understanding. I think that our truest prayers come from there too, the often unspoken, unbidden prayers that can rise out of the lives of unbelievers as well as believers whether they recognize them as prayers or not. And I think that from there also come our best dreams and our times of gladdest playing and taking it easy and all those moments when we find ourselves being better or stronger or braver or wiser than we are.”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister

“Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track, you and I, of these stories of who we are and where we have come from and the people we have met along the way because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known to each of us most powerfully and personally. If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but also spiritually.”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister

“Remember that the lives of other people are not your business. They are their business. They are God's business because they all have God whether they use the word God or not. Even your own life is not your business. It also is God's business. Leave it to God.”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister

“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.”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister

“As I understand it, to say that God is mightily present even in such private events as these does not mean that he makes events happen to us which move us in certain directions like chessmen. Instead, events happen under their own steam as random as rain, which means that God is present in them not as their cause but as the one who even in the hardest and most hair-raising of them offers us the possibility of that new life and healing which I believe is what salvation is.”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister

“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.”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister

“The sad things that happened long ago will always remain part of who we are just as the glad and gracious things will too, but instead of being a burden of guilt, recrimination, and regret that make us constantly stumble as we go, even the saddest things can become, once we have made peace with them, a source of wisdom and strength for the journey that still lies ahead. It is through memory that we are able to reclaim much of our lives that we have long since written off by finding that in everything that has happened to us over the years God was offering us possibilities of new life and healing which, though we may have missed them at the time, we can still choose an be brought to life by and healed by all these years later.”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister

“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.”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister

“What deadens us most to God’s presence within us, I think, is the inner dialogue that we are continuously engaged in with ourselves, the endless chatter of human thought. I suspect that there is nothing more crucial to true spiritual comfort . . . than being able from time to time to stop that chatter including the chatter of spoken prayer.”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister

“It is also only during the last few years that I have begun to discover something about what watching and listening involve. I am talking about prayer - prayer not as speaking to God, which in a scattered way I do many times a day because I cannot help doing it, but prayer as being deeply silent, as watching and listening for God to speak.
I have written at length here about the way God speaks through the hieroglyphics of the things that happen to us, and I believe that is true. But I have come to believe more and more that God also speaks through the fathomless quiet of the holy place in the White Tower within us all which is beyond the power of anything that happens to us to touch although many things that happen to us block our access to it, make us forget even that it exists. I believe that this quiet and holy place in us is God's place and that it is what marks us as God's.”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister

“I have spent uncounted hours of my life in such haggard waiting, crazy in my conviction that they would never come back at all because something unspeakable had happened to them the way I had learned as a child that unspeakable things happen. And it has taken me years to understand that what I feared most of all was perhaps less the disaster that might have befallen them than the disaster of being locked up in the dark of my own fear. The Cowardly Lion.”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister

“During one of our sessions I had the feeling that the therapist was trying to lead me to some major insight that might help save the day for me. When I asked if that was the case, she acknowledged it, but when I asked if she would be willing simply to tell me in some many words what the insight was, she demurred. That was not the sway psychotherapy worked, she said. It was something I would have to come to on my own if it was to have any real value for me, she said, or something like that. But then as the end of the hour drew near, she relented and put into words what it was she had been trying to lead me to see. There was nothing in the world just then that I was more fascinated to hear - for all I knew my recovery itself might depend on it - but even later that same day I couldn't have told you what she said nor could I possibly tell you now. I was simply not ready to hear it yet. The words I could hear all right, but in terms of their meaning I was as deaf as my mother before me, and possibly, like her, because I chose to be deaf. Possibly I was not ready to be well yet either.”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister

“In fact I am inclined to believe that God's chief purpose in giving us memory is to enable us to go back in time so that if we didn't play those roles right the first time round, we can still have another go at it now. We cannot undo our old mistakes or their consequences any more than we can erase old wounds that we have both suffered and inflicted, but through the power that memory gives us of thinking, feeling, imagining our way back through time we can at long last finally finish with the past in the sense of removing its power to hurt us and other people to to stunt our growth as human beings.”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister

“Is it true, what Jesus believed, this Truth that he died for and lived for? Maybe the only way to know finally this side of falling off that precipice ourselves is to stop speaking and thinking and reading about it so much and to start watching and listening.”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister

“But it was something else too, MacFarlane said. It was a denial, but it was also the truth. Peter really did not know who Jesus was, did not really know, and neither do any of us really know who Jesus is either. Beyond all we can find to say about him and believe about him, he remains always beyond our grasp, except maybe once in a while the hem of his garment. We should never forget that. We can love him, we can learn from him, but we can come to know him only by following him—by searching for him in his church, in his Gospels, in each other. That was the sermon I heard anyway, and I remember thinking that if it were not for all the reasons I have for living where I do, I could imagine moving a thousand miles just to be near where I could hear truth spoken like that.”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister

“When they 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. To love our neighbors as we love ourselves means also to love ourselves as we love our neighbors. It means to treat ourselves with as much kindness and understanding as we would the person next door who is in trouble. Little by little then we begin to be able to look at each other’s faces, and at our own faces in the mirror, without the intervening shadows that unaired secrets cast.”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister

“The sadness was I'd lost a father I had never fully found. It's like a tune that ends before you've heard it out. Your whole life through you search to catch the strain, and seek the face you've lost in strangers' faces.”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister

“We are commanded to love our neighbors as ourselves, and I believe that to love ourselves means to extend to those various selves that we have been along the way the same degree of compassion and concern that we would extend to anyone else.”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister

“I think that I learned something about how even tragedy can be a means of grace that I might never have come to any other way.”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister

“because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister