01UndatedLife isn't memorable enough to remember everything. It's not like there are explosions all the time, or dog smoking cigarettes.Donald Miller / quote ↗
02UndatedWhen you live countless stories in which you play a sedentary role, it's an odd feeling to switch stories.Donald Miller / quote ↗
03UndatedWhat good does it do to tell somebody to live morally so they can die 50 years later and apparently go to Hell?Donald Miller / quote ↗
04UndatedHe 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 / quote ↗
05UndatedI 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 / quote ↗
06UndatedDwight 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 / quote ↗
07Undated(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 / quote ↗
08UndatedBecause it is so scatterbrained and has absolutely no charts and graphs, I'm actually quite surprised the Bible sells.Donald Miller / quote ↗
09UndatedYou'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 / quote ↗
11UndatedI 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 / quote ↗
12UndatedWhen 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 / quote ↗
14UndatedI 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 / quote ↗
15UndatedI asked God to help me understand the story of the forest and what it means to be a tree in that story.Donald Miller / quote ↗
16UndatedThe 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 / quote ↗
17UndatedI 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 / quote ↗
18UndatedWe 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 / quote ↗
19Undated...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 / quote ↗
20UndatedThe 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 / quote ↗
21UndatedThe downside of being a writer is you get plenty of time to overthink your life.Donald Miller / quote ↗
22UndatedAll 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 / quote ↗
23UndatedJesus had no regard for the lifeboat politics you and I live within every day.Donald Miller / quote ↗
