Frederick Buechner Quotes

Even the greatest poets can't express tragedy in a way that is larger than their immediate circumstances.

Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrow.

You lose somebody you've possibly known for years and on top of that you lose a character that you love seeing on TV so I think that kind of makes it cool that we pay a price too. That it is painful on many levels and its amazing to be writing that moment and crossing that line right on the page and seeing the ugliness of it and having to deal with it. It's a very weird thing.

I think there is pressure on people to turn every negative into a positive, but we should be allowed to say, 'I went through something really strange and awful and it has altered me forever.'

Poets have always celebrated grief as one of the deepest human emotions.

I think, as you're growing up, your emotions are just as deep as they are when you're an adult. You're ability to feel lonely, longing, confused or angry are just as deep. We don't feel things more as we get older.

A very powerful theme in fiction is that of loss.

It's the poignancy and sadness in things that gets to me.

Life is a very emotional experience.

If your depiction of loss doesn't make the reader feel loss, then you didn't depict it right.

Anytime you really take a close look at people who are dealing with the aging process, you're going to have a complicated reaction to what you're seeing and feeling. If you're in the middle of it, those emotions are going to be quadrupled. It's immediate, it's relatable, so it's good human drama.

'J' is a novel. A story about what it is like for people after a terrible event. And it is a love story, because I feel a novel is inevitably a love story.

Emotion is a broad spectrum and I just been to a lot of sides of my own emotions.

I want to entertain, but I'm interested in a whole range of feelings.

All the best songs have an element of sadness.

When everything else falls down around us, just knowing that there's another person who will miss us when we're gone is enough to see us through our darkest moments.

Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.

Tell me, how can I live without my Husband any longer? This is my first awakening thought each morning, and as I watch the waves of the turbulent lake under our windows I sometimes feel I should like to go under them.

Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the one you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.

Wheather it is conscious or not, you eventually make the decision to divide your life in half - before and after - with loss being that tight bubble in the middle. You can move around in spite of it; you can laugh and smile and carry on with your life, but all it takes is one slow range of motion, a doubling over, to be fully aware of the empty space at your center.

A widow is like a frigate of which the first captain has been shipwrecked.

One of the things about grief is that it can bring a deeper perspective into your life; in the end, it has, for me, though it's also brought sorrow.

It's total bullshit," he said. "The whole thing. Eighty percent survival rate and he's in the twenty percent? Bullshit. He was such a bright kid. It's bullshit. I hate it. But it was sure a privilege to love him, huh?

Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone.