Donald Miller Quotes

Everybody wants to be somebody fancy. Even if they're shy.
Donald Miller
I think if you like somebody you have to tell them. It might be embarrassing to say it, but you will never regret stepping up. I know from personal experience, however, that you should not keep telling a girl that you like her after she tells you she isn't into it. You should not keep riding your bike by her house either.
Donald Miller
Author Toni Morrison swats aside other possible sources of her success and says that the ONLY reason she is a great writer is because when she walked into a room as a child her father's face lit up.
Donald Miller
The only appropriate war rhetoric is more rhetoric that calls our enemies spirits and people with flesh the victims of this war. Satan wants us to fight with one another, and I understand that some evil must be restrained, but our war, the war of the ones who believe in Jesus, is a war unseen. If we could muster a portion of the patriotism we feel toward our earthly nations into patriotism and bravery in concert with the kingdom of God, the enemy would take fewer casualties.
Donald Miller
Sometimes the things we want most in life are the things that will kill us.
Donald Miller
I bring this up because in writing some thoughts about a father, or not having a father, I feel as though I'm writing a book about a troll under a bridge or a dragon. For me, a father was nothing more than a character in a fairy tale. I know fathers are not like dragons because fathers actually exist. I have seen them on television and sliding their arms around their wives in grocery stores, and I have seen them in the malls and in the coffee shops, but these were characters in other people's stories. The sad thing is, as a kid, I wondered why I couldn't have a dragon, but I never wondered why I didn't have a father. (page 20)
Donald Miller
All this gave way to my first encounter with guilt, which is still something entirely inscrutable to me, as if aliens were sending transmissions from another planet, telling me there is a right and a wrong in the universe.
Donald Miller
Life no longer felt meaningless. It felt stressful and terrifying, but it definitely didn't feel meaningless.
Donald Miller
I've never walked out of a meaningless movie thinking ALL movies are meaningless. I only thought the movie I walked out on was meaningless. I wonder, then, if when people say life is meaningless, what they really mean is THEIR lives are meaningless.
Donald Miller
When one of my friends becomes a Christian, which happens about every 10 years because I am a sheep about sharing my faith, the experience is euphoric. I see in their eyes the trueness of the story.
Donald Miller
People assume when you're swimming in a river you are supposed to know which way you are going, and I guess some of the time that is true, but there are certain currents that are very strong, and it's when we are in those currents we need somebody to come along, pull us out, and guide us in a safer direction. (page 18)
Donald Miller
..[My friend Marco said]. essentially, humans are alive for the purpose of journey, a kind of three-act structure. They are born and spend several years discovering themselves and the world, then plod through a long middle in which they are compelled to search for a mate and reproduce and also create stability out of natural instability and then they find themselves at an ending tha seems to be designed for reflection. At the end, their bodies are slower, they are not as easily distracted, they do less work, and they think and feel about a life lived rather than look forward to a life getting started. He didn't know what the point of the journey was, but he did believe we were designed to search for and find something. And he wondered out loud if the point wasn't the search but the transformation the search creates. ...[I wondered] that we were designed to live through something rather than to attain something, and the thing we were meant to live through was designed to change us. The point of a story is the character arc, the change.
Donald Miller
If the point of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation. If I got any comfort as I set out on my first story, it was that in nearly every story, the protagonist is transformed. He's a jerk at the beginning and nice at the end, or a coward at the beginning and brave at the end. If the character doesn't change, the story hasn't happened yet. And if story is derived from real life, if story is just condensed version of life then life itself may be designed to change us so that we evolve from one kind of person to another.
Donald Miller
What if part of God's message to the world was you, the true and real you?
Donald Miller
...the words alone, lonely, and loneliness are three of the most powerful words in the English language...those words say that we are human; they are like the words hunger and thirst. But they are not words about the body, they are words about the soul.
Donald Miller
I learned that true love turns the other cheek, does not take a wrong into account, loves all people regardless of their indifference or hostility.
Donald Miller
The problem is this: those of us who are never satisfied with our accomplishments secretly believe nobody will love us unless we’re perfect.
Donald Miller
When I walked into the Christian section of a bookstore, the message was clear: Faith is something you do alone. Rick does not have much tolerance for people living alone. He’s like Bill Clinton in that he feels everyone’s pain. If Rick thinks somebody is lonely, he can’t sleep at night. He wants us all to live with each other and play nice so he can get some rest. Tortured soul.
Donald Miller
If you think about it, we get robbed of the mystery of being alive. I think we get robbed of the glory of it because we don't remember how we got here. When you get born, you wake up slowly to everything. From birth to 26, God is slowly turning on the lights, and you are groggy and pointing at things, and say "Circle," and, "Blue,", and, "Car," and, "Sex," and then, "Job," and, "Healthcare". The experience is so slow, you could easily come to believe life isn't that big of a deal, that life isn't staggering. Life IS staggering, and we are just too used to it.
Donald Miller
The reason stories have dramatic tension is because LIFE has dramatic tension.
Donald Miller
Just out of high school, you didn't realize you were creating drama for the sake of drama.
Donald Miller
But love doesn’t control, and I suppose that’s why it’s the ultimate risk. In the end, we have to hope the person we’re giving our heart to won’t break it, and be willing to forgive them when they do, even as they will forgive us. Real love stories don’t have dictators, they have participants. Love is an ever-changing, complicated, choose-your-own adventure narrative that offers the world but guarantees nothing. When you climb a mountain or sail an ocean, you’re rewarded for staying in control. Perhaps that’s another reason true intimacy is so frightening. It’s the one thing we all want, and must give up control to get.
Donald Miller
Life has a peculiar feel when you look back on it that it doesn't have when you're actually living it. It's as though the whole thing were designed to be understood in hindsight, as though you'll never know the meaning of your experiences until you've had enough of them to provide reference.
Donald Miller
You get a feeling when you look back on life that all God really wants from us is to live inside a body He made, and enjoy the story, and to bond with Him through the experience.
Donald Miller
Paul was terribly personal. The books I like are the ones that make you feel like you are with a person who is being quite vulnerable, telling you all sorts of stuff that is personal, and that's the thing Paul did that makes me like him.
Donald Miller
If the Gospel of Jesus is relational, that is, if our brokenness will be fixed not by our understanding of theology but by God telling us who we are, then this would require a kind of intimacy of which only Heaven knows.
Donald Miller
I'm perfectly willing to be perfectly human.
Donald Miller
All relationships are teleological, are going somewhere.
Donald Miller
For a long time, I thought I was good at relationships because I was charming.
Donald Miller
About the time I told God that He didn't exist, I was desperate for an identity.
Donald Miller
A big part of me needed something outside myself to tell me who I was. The thing that had been designed to tell me who I was was gone.
Donald Miller
The repentance we are called to is about choosing one audience over another.
Donald Miller
I lay there under the stars and thought of what a great responsibility it is to be human.
Donald Miller
The same principles that make up a good story also make up a good life.
Donald Miller
A story is based on what people think is important, so when we live a story, we are telling people around us what we think is important.
Donald Miller
I will love you like God, because of God, mighted by the power of God. I will stop expecting your love, demanding your love, trading for your love, gaming for your love. I will simply love. I am giving myself to you, and tomorrow I will do it again. I suppose the clock itself will wear thin its time before I am ended at this altar of dying and dying again. God risked Himself on me. I will risk myself on you. And together, we will learn to love, and perhaps then, and only then, understand this gravity that drew Him, unto us.
Donald Miller
It wasn't necessary to win for the story to be great, it was only necessary to sacrifice everything.
Donald Miller
Jesus had no regard for the lifeboat politics you and I live within every day.
Donald Miller
We were made to be distracted by life, by story.
Donald Miller
All our time spent making lists would be better spent painting, or writing, Or singing, or learning to speak stories. Sometimes I feel as though the Church has a kind of pity for Scripture, Always having to come behind it and explain everything, put everything into actionable steps, acronyms and hidden secrets, as though the original writers, and for that matter the Holy Spirit Who worked in the lives of the original writers, were a bunch of you literate hillbillies. I think the methodology God used to explain His Truth is quite superior. My life is a story, more than a list. I don't feel that a list could ever explain the complexity of all this beauty.
Donald Miller
The downside of being a writer is you get plenty of time to overthink your life.
Donald Miller
The actual language of life is not the charts and graphs and stuff we map out to feel smart. The hidden language we are speaking is really about negotiating the feeling God used to give us.
Donald Miller
We don't know how much we are capable of loving until the people we love are being taken away, until a beautiful story is ending.
Donald Miller
...I wondered about the story we were writing and wanted even more to write a better story for myself, something that leaves a beautiful feeling even as the credits roll.
Donald Miller
I was starting to believe I was a character in a greater story, which is why the elements of story made sense in the first place.
Donald Miller
The inciting incident is how you get (characters) to do something. It's the doorway through which they can't return, you know. The story takes care of the rest.
Donald Miller
I asked God to help me understand the story of the forest and what it means to be a tree in that story.
Donald Miller
I don't wonder anymore what I'll tell God when I go to heaven when we sit in the chairs under the tree, outside the city........I'll tell these things to God, and he'll laugh, I think and he'll remind me of the parts I forgot, the parts that were his favorite. We'll sit and remember my story together, and then he'll stand and put his arms around me and say, "well done," and that he liked my story. And my soul won't be thirsty anymore. Finally he'll turn and we'll walk toward the city, a city he will have spoken into existence a city built in a place where once there'd been nothing.
Donald Miller
You don't realize your story is changing you until you look back.
Donald Miller
When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you like them for who they are. And when you stop expecting material possessions to complete you, you'd be surprised how much pleasure you get from material possessions. And when you stop expecting God to end all your troubles, you'd be surprised how much you like spending time with God.
Donald Miller
I listened so hard because it felt like, while she was telling me stories, she was massaging my soul, letting me know that I was not alone, that I will never have to be alone, that there are friends and family and churches and coffee shops. I was not going to be cast into space.
Donald Miller
The mountains themselves call us into greater stories.
Donald Miller
You'd think God would come right out and tell us what to do in the Bible, but He doesn't. He mostly tells stories, and He rarely stops the story to say what the point is. He just lets the characters and conflict hang in the air like smoke.
Donald Miller
(The monks) approach was far less narcissistic and our tends to be. Their goal when reading Scripture was to see Christ in every verse, and not a mirror image of themselves.
Donald Miller
Because it is so scatterbrained and has absolutely no charts and graphs, I'm actually quite surprised the Bible sells.
Donald Miller
Dwight Eisenhower said that from the beginning, his mother and father operated on an assumption that set the course of his life - that the world could be fixed of its problems if every child understood the necessity of their existence. Eisenhower's parents assumed, and taught their children, that if their children weren't alive, their family couldn't function. (page 34)
Donald Miller
I never thought to ascribe my mother's emotional and physical exhaustion to the lack of a husband and father; rather, I ascribed it to my existence. In other words, I grew up learning the exact opposite of what Eisenhower was taught. I learned that if I didn't exist, the family would be better off. I grew up believing that if I had never been born, things would be easier for the people I loved. (page 35)
Donald Miller
He thought about the story his daughter was living and the role she was playing inside that story. He realized he hadn't provided a better role for his daughter. He hadn't mapped out a story for his family. And so his daughter had chosen another story, a story in which she was wanted, even if she was only being used. In the absence of a family story, she'd chosen a story in which there was risk and adventure, rebellion and independence.
Donald Miller
What good does it do to tell somebody to live morally so they can die 50 years later and apparently go to Hell?
Donald Miller
When you live countless stories in which you play a sedentary role, it's an odd feeling to switch stories.
Donald Miller