The Remarkable Ordinary Quotes

“So we are told to love. We are told to listen. We are told to look. But a lot of the time we don’t because we choose damn well not to, and because only a saint could do it all the time, I think. You have to choose who to listen to because if you listen to everybody and you look at everybody—seeing every face the way Rembrandt saw that woman’s face—how could you make it down half a city block? You couldn’t. If you listened to what everybody says to you, how could you survive a day? But we can do more than we do—more than we do, surely we could do that.”
― Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life

“So, art is saying Stop. It helps us to stop by putting a frame around something and makes us see it in a way we would never have seen it under the normal circumstances of living, as so many of us do, on sort of automatic pilot, going through the world without really seeing much of anything.”
― Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life

“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.”
― Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life

“I did not see anything because I was so caught up in an inner dialogue. So, stop and see. Become more sensitive, more aware, more alive to our own humanness, to the humanness of each other.”
― Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life

“I don't know what it means to love God. Really, I'm not all that good at it. But I think one of the things it means is, just as in the case of loving anybody else, you stop and watch and wait. Listen for God. Stop and watch and wait for him. To love God means to pay attention. Be mindful. Be open to the possibility that God is with you in ways that, unless you have your eyes open, you may never glimpse. The speaks words that, unless you have your ears open, you may never hear. Draw near to him as best you can.”
― Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life

“We’ve all had saints in our lives, by which I mean not plaster saints, not moral exemplars, not people setting for us a kind of suffocating good example, but I mean saints in the sense of life givers. People through knowing whom we become more alive.”
― Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life

“To love your neighbor is to see your neighbor. To see somebody, really to see somebody, you have to love somebody.”
― Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life

“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.”
― Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life

“Knowing that even though you see only through a glass darkly, even though lots of things happen - wars and peacemaking, hunger and homelessness - joy is knowing, even for a moment, that underneath everything are the everlasting arms.”
― Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life

“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?”
― Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life

“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.”
― Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life

“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.”
― Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life

“We’re all, by and large, comparatively speaking, rich people and have perhaps more than one home. And yet the question is, are we really at home anywhere? Are we really at home in any of our homes? Because it seems to me that to be at home somewhere means to be at peace somewhere and I have a feeling at some deep level there can really be no peace for any of us, no real home for any of us, until there is some measure of real peace for everybody until everybody has a home.”
― Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life

“It’s so easy to look and see what we pass through in this world, but we don’t. If you’re like me, you see so little. You see what you expect to see rather than what’s there.”
― Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life

“Writing does a lot of other things, of course. People write books to instruct. They write books to move us, to scare us, to enlighten us in all sorts of ways. But basically what these works of literature or of art are doing is to say, Stop thinking. Stop expecting. Stop living in the past. Stop living in the future. Stop doing anything and just pay attention to this.”
― Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life