Frederick Buechner Quotes

Through my research, I found that vulnerability is the glue that holds relationships together. It's the magic sauce.

The human heart, at whatever age, opens only to the heart that opens in return.

You need to keep people close. You need to give them access to your heart.

I love being free enough that I can be so intimate with people, and that people are free enough that we can all be intimate with each other!

Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual.

What goes on between a father and a son, which is usually such a private matter, is that they are able to be honest with each other, and be honest with me, as a director. It's just remarkable.

Trust cannot be commanded; and yet it is also correct that the only one who earns trust is the one who is prepared to grant trust.

Sex isn't hard, but intimacy is terrifying.

Physical intimacy is easy. Emotional intimacy is hard.

Even The Impostors, as silly as it is, is a very intimate film, in a way.

What you want to do is put people in a position where they feel connected enough to you that they're willing to collaborate with you; they're willing to show you the things that they were scared to tell you about before.

Life is short. People are not easy to know. They're not easy to know, so if you don't tell them how you feel, you're not going to get anywhere, I feel.

Honesty and vulnerability endear us to people; they don't endanger us in our relationship.

There is a no man's land between sex and love, and it alters in the night.

Remember, intimacy increases with honesty. Share less to keep people away and more to draw them closer.

I have to let myself be vulnerable in order to have a good marriage. That's something I'm really going to have to work on. A lot of times I'm really guarded because of what I do for a living, what I've done in my life.

The more you think that you are watching a show about sex, the more you ultimately are watching a show about the challenges of just connecting with human beings and being intimate.

The act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.

Something about telling that story made my gut grow back together." What?" Oh, nothing. Just thinking out loud." That's who you really like. The people you can think out loud in front of." The people who've been in your secret hiding places." The people you bite your thumb in front of." Hi." Hi." ..." ..." Wow. My first Lindsey." My second Colin." That was fun. Let's try it again." Sold." ..." ..." ...".

The most intimate feeling people can share is neither love nor hate, but pain.

About what mainly constituted what you ask, it was something other. It was just a certain inclination to meet people. And as far as possible, to change something in the other, but also to let me be changed by him. At any event, I had no resistance, I put no resistance to it. I already began as a young man. I felt I have not the right to want to change another if I am not open to be changed by him as far as it is legitimate.

I want to talk to him. I want to ask him about that girl and if he loved her and still misses her. Nothing, however, exits my mouth. How well do we really let ourselves know each other? There's a long quietness until I finally break it open. It reminds me of someone breaking bread and handing it out. In my case, I hand out a question to my friend.

It's an industry of lonely people in a crowd, Bill Margold was saying. 'They're scared to get close to each other. You're far better off having someone to sleep next to then having someone to sleep with because you have to trust someone you sleep next to.

For a marriage relationship to flourish, there must be intimacy. It takes an enormous amount of courage to say to your spouse, 'This is me. I'm not proud of it - in fact, I'm a little embarrassed by it - but this is who I am.

At the end of the day, when it comes down to it, all we really want is to be close to somebody. So this thing where we all keep our distance and pretend not to care about each other, it's usually a load of bull. So we pick and choose who we want to remain close to, and once we've chosen those people, we tend to stick close by. No matter how much we hurt them. The people that are still with you at the end of the day, those are the ones worth keeping. And sure, sometimes close can be too close. But sometimes, that invasion of personal space, it can be exactly what you need.