Frederick Buechner can find grace and redemption even in the shoddiest, phoniest aspects of a cultural wasteland. One reads Lion Country...with hope and delight.

Keep doing good deeds long enough, and you'll probably turn out a good man in spite of yourself.

I don't give a damn what people think.

A neurotic can perfectly well be a literary genius, but his greatest danger is always that he will not recognize when he is dull.

We were not as rich as the Rockefellers or Mellons, but we were rich enough to know how rich they were.

Only little boys and old men sneer at love.

A man can spend his whole existence never learning the simple lesson that he has only one life and that if he fails to do what he wants with it, nobody else really cares.

The only thing that keeps a man going is energy. And what is energy but liking life?

There is a charm, even for homely things, in perfect maintenance.

Great lovers have made great sacrifices.

Perfection irritates as well as it attracts, in fiction as in life.

The answer to all questions of human society is in the lessons of human history, which are revealed in the Bible.

On the way out, I hug Mum, holding her close. 'Thank you, ' I whisper. 'For dinner - and for everything.'Mum smiles and strokes my cheek. 'There's nothing to thank me for.

I do not think that there can ever be enough books about anything

But their determination to banish fools foundered ultimately in the installation of absolute idiots.

I still doubt it will work." "You'd doubt the sun's rising if you weren't proven wrong each day," Raoden said with a smile.

I was a fighter and very determined. There was no way I was going to back out without winning.

History remembers most what you did last.

A woman in love can't be reasonable - or she probably wouldn't be in love.

The mind quickly responds to teaching and discipline. You can make the mind give you back anything you want.

I respect someone's right to privacy and I want them to know it.