A Quote by Frederick Buechner

It is important to tell our secrets too because ... it makes it easier for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own, and exchanges like that have a lot to do with what being a family is all about and what being human is all about.
It's extraordinary how self-obsessed human beings are. The things that people always go on about is, 'tell us about us', 'tell us about the first human being'. We are so self-obsessed with our own history. There is so much more out there than what connects to us.
I feel like it's important for young African-American girls - and all people - to read books that tell our stories and watch movies that tell our stories and do the research on our own, too, because sometimes that's not being told, and we're not being seen and shown.
I'm a huge proponent of exchanges, student exchanges, cultural exchanges, university exchanges. We talk a lot about public diplomacy, .. It's extremely important that we get our message out, but it's also the case that we should not have a monologue with other people. It has to be a conversation, and you can't do that without exchanges and openness.
I am curious about people. I want to know their secrets... because I am the last person to whom I would tell a secret; people tell me their secrets.
An honorable human relationship- that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word "love"- is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other. It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity. It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
if I could tell my very-younger self something, I would tell him to let loose more often. I think it all roots in sexuality, but because of that, I became so worried about everything — worried about what people thought. I was afraid to be creative and charismatic and eccentric. Just to do things to do things, like dancing. I was afraid of looking too flamboyant or something. I would tell myself to stop being so stressed about what other people are thinking. Stop being so afraid that something may not come off the right way.
Books that recount ordeals are precious because an ordeal is what we most fear, and the stories that tell us how to survive them reassure us about what a human being is capable of, as we survive our own lives every day, our own mysterious journeys.
I think comics is a really good way to talk about skepticism and atheism and things like that... it was easy to tell those stories and, I think, helpful to some people to tell them in comic form. Using visuals makes it easier to break stuff down and makes it somewhat easier to understand.
The thing about secrets is that they are usually best kept by just one person. That was the special thing about secrets. Some people seemed to think that the best way to keep a secret was to tell as many people as possible; what could possibly go wrong for a secret when there were so many people defending it?
If I tell you that I would be disobeying the god and on that account it is impossible for me to keep quiet, you won't be persuaded by me, taking it that I am ionizing. And if I tell you that it is the greatest good for a human being to have discussions every day about virtue and the other things you hear me talking about, examining myself and others, and that the unexamined life is not livable for a human being, you will be even less persuaded.
Somebody asked me earlier if I thought it was really important to tell stories about women's struggles. And I said yes, but at the same time, it's also important to tell stories about women's triumphs, women being slackers, women being criminals, women being heroes.
If we approach other people understanding our own value, being confident in who we are, being centered and grounded, it's actually easier for us to connect with them because we can listen more deeply and we can express ourselves more authentically without fear of being judged or not being enough.
Most of us are consumed with our own thoughts and desires and are not always thinking about what other people may want. This is not necessarily being egocentric; it is just being human.
The social scientist is in a difficult, if not impossible position. On the one hand there is the temptation to see all of society as one's autobiography writ large, surely not the path to general truth. On the other hand, there is the attempt to be general and objective by pretending that one knows nothing about the experience of being human, forcing the investigator to pretend that people usually know and tell the truth about important issues, when we all know from our own lives how impossible that is.
Nothing is as universal as some good scatalogical humor. I try to shift the frame in which people think about poetry from being distant or "sacred" to being more human, because then I think it becomes easier to feel like poetry belongs to us, is for us, is from us.
I was thinking about it: so many of my stories are about my family life, not about being related to a lot of famous people. That's my grandma, that's my mama, my daddy, my aunt, my uncle, my stepdaddy. I'd probably tell them even if they weren't well known.
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