Donald Miller Quotes

The reward you get from a story is always less than you thought it would be, and the work is harder than you imagined. The point of a story is never about the ending, remember. It's about your character getting molded in the hard work of the middle. At some point the shore behind you stops getting smaller, and you paddle and wonder why the same strokes that used to move you now only rock the boat. You got the wife, but you don't know if you like her anymore and you've only been married for five years. You want to wake up and walk into the living room in your underwear and watch football and let your daughters play with the dog because the far shore doesn't get closer no matter how hard you paddle.The shore you left is just as distant, and there is no going back; there is only the decision to paddle in place or stop, slide out of the hatch, and sink into the sea. Maybe there's another story at the bottom of the sea. Maybe you don't have to be in this story anymore.

~ Donald Miller

Sometimes when I watch my dog, I think about how good life can be, if we only lose ourselves in our stories. Lucy doesn't read self-help books about how to be a dog; she just IS a dog. All she wants to do is chase ducks and sticks and do other things that make both her and me happy. It makes me wonder if that was the intention for man, to chase sticks and ducks, to name animals, to create families, and to keep looking back at God to feed off his pleasure at our pleasure.

~ Donald Miller

God allows us to face the tension whether we like it or not.

~ Donald Miller

Perhaps one of the reasons I've avoided standing on the point toward the horizon is the second you stand up and point toward a horizon, you realize how much there is to lose.

~ Donald Miller

Life isn't memorable enough to remember everything. It's not like there are explosions all the time, or dog smoking cigarettes.

~ Donald Miller

When you live countless stories in which you play a sedentary role, it's an odd feeling to switch stories.

~ 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

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

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

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

(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

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 mountains themselves call us into greater stories.

~ 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

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

You don't realize your story is changing you until you look back.

~ 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

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 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

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

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

The downside of being a writer is you get plenty of time to overthink your life.

~ 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

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

It wasn't necessary to win for the story to be great, it was only necessary to sacrifice everything.

~ 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

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

The same principles that make up a good story also make up a good life.

~ Donald Miller

I lay there under the stars and thought of what a great responsibility it is to be human.

~ Donald Miller

The repentance we are called to is about choosing one audience over another.

~ 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

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

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