Quotes from Telling the Truth
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Silence.
What came to mind when you read that single word? Did reading it make you pause, wonder, perhaps even feel a little uncomfortable? One of the best things noted in Buechner’s book is that silence has the ability to say the unsayable. He describes words as frames and points out the significance of a presented silence. He recognizes that telling the truth requires silences as well as words.
If you needed more than three reasons to read Frederick Buechners’s Telling the Truth, or you just want to reminisce why you also love it, here are just a few of my favourite quotes.
To sentimentalize something is to savor rather than suffer the sadness of it, to sigh over the prettiness of it rather than to tremble at the beauty of it, which may make fearsome demands of us or pose fearsome threats.
…we are none of us very good at silence. It says too much.
We put frames of words around silence and shells of stone and wood around emptiness, but it is the silence, the emptiness themselves that finally matter and out of which the Gospel comes as word.
Is it possible, I wonder, to say that it is only when you hear the Gospel as a wild and marvelous joke that you really hear it at all?
The comedy of grace as what needn’t happen and can’t possibly happen because it can only impossibly happen and happens in the dark that only just barely fails to swallow it up.
what were some of your favourite quotes?
» Don’t miss other Frederick Buechner posts: Telling the Truth, Discover: First Lines #2, Daily Reading Books, and A New Year.
