I find companionship in Buechner's writings because for me, too, faith is a Pascalian gamble. Though I spend my life in pursuit of God, I often sense that God lies just around the next bend in the trail, just behind the next tree in the forest. I keep walking because I like where the journey has led me thus far, because other paths seem more problematic than my own, and because I yearn for the resolution of the plot. I know a little of life's tragedy. I have tasted of its comedy. I keep walking because I believe in the fairy tale, that a God strong and wise enough to create a world stamped with such beauty and goodness will be faithful in restoring it to the original design.

-- "Soul Survivor," by Philip Yancey

... yet it surprises [Frederick Buechner] not at all that God gives us only "momentary glimpses into a mystery of such depth, power and beauty that if we were to see it head on, in any way other than in glimpses, I suspect we would be annihilated."

-- "Soul Survivor," by Philip Yancey

"Perhaps God indeed saves his deepest silence for his saints, and if so I do not merit that silence. I have intellectual doubts, of course. But as John Updike puts it, if there is no God then the universe is a freak show, and I do not experience it as a freak show. Though I have had neither the maleficent or the beatific vision, I have heard whispers from the wings of the stage."

-- Frederick Buechner, in "Soul Survivor,"
by Philip Yancey

"In two thousand years, we have not worked out the kinks. We positively glorify them. Week after week we witness the same miracle: that God is so mighty he can stifle his own laughter."

-- Annie Dillard, in "Soul Survivor,"
by Philip Yancey

"It's all a matter of keeping my eyes open," she says. "Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them. The least we can do is try to be there ... so that creation need not play to an empty house."

-- Annie Dillard, from "Soul Survivor,"
by Philip Yancey