Donald Miller Quotations

Every human being is searching for a deep sense of meaning, and yet we're all chasing success. We've confused one for the other.

Christians might say that you can't live a more meaningful life without Jesus. Well, that's absolutely not true. You can. You can enjoy a sunrise whether you know Jesus or not.

I think that's the true litmus test for someone who has become closer to Jesus: their heart is more loving, accepting, childlike, less believing that they have all the answers and more believing in Him.

One of the things I associate with God is a sunrise. How many sunrises have you missed over the years, and God created that?

I think, in the grand epic, Jesus is the hero of our stories. And our stories, as they were, are subplots in a grand epic and our job is not to be the hero of any story. Our job is to be a saint in a story that he is telling.

Sunday morning church service is not an enormous priority; spending time with other believers is.

It confuses me that Christian living is not simpler. The gospel, the very good news, is simple.

I started 'Storyline' after I'd accomplished all my goals and still wasn't happy. I'd become a 'New York Times' bestselling author, which was my goal from high school, and yet I was less happy after accomplishing my goals than I was before.

Meaning is something we experience more than we attain. It's like finding a nice, easy current in a river that carries you through life.

I think understanding your life as a story is a really terrific way of kind of knowing where you are and knowing who you are.

One of the things I love about our source text as Christians, the Bible, is that it teaches us not to avoid conflict. And it teaches us that before the fall of man, in Paradise, there was conflict. God wants conflict to be a part of your life.

If you have a beautiful story, it has to have conflict. If you don't have conflict, it can't be a good story.

People are lonely. They want company and your book can provide them company and a little bit of hope. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Without a positive male role model in your life, it is extremely difficult to become a man who benefits his family and benefits society.

Most of us are waiting. We're waiting for something interesting to happen. And I think we're going to wait forever if we don't do something more interesting with our lives.

The most important thing that happens within Christian spirituality is when a person falls in love with Jesus.

I tend to write first drafts that are incredibly cognitive, very rational, very boring. They come off as justification. Like, 'This is my idea and here's all the reasons that it's right.' It doesn't make for very compelling reading.

I used to write when I was in the mood or felt inspired. Anymore, I write whether I feel inspired or not. It's a discipline. So that's definitely different. It's part of maturing as a person and as a professional.

Life is a story. You and I are telling stories; they may suck, but we are telling stories. And we tell stories about the things that we want. So you go through your bank account, and those are things you have told stories about.

There's no authoritarian structure at Reed College, but the education is conservative. So what you have is a lot of students who are very authentically looking for truth.

We don't naturally want to take responsibility for our lives. We want to give the responsibility to someone else. We blame them when our lives aren't good.

I love writing books - I really do. If I could just quit everything and work on a book every day, I would love that most.

I'm not a pastor; I've never been on staff at a church.

The reason I like writing a memoir is because it isn't preachy.

I think it's very hard for us, for Christians, to understand that it's okay to read a book, for instance, on how to manage your time. There's nothing wrong with that.

I have a real problem with (solely funding the program) unless the townships kick in some money to help fund it,

Mexicans are educating themselves and becoming serious consumers of wine, and sommeliers in Mexico City are starting to take notice.

I posted chapters online and let people give feedback, and I was surprised at how much of that feedback I actually used for the book.I posted chapters online and let people give feedback, and I was surprised at how much of that feedback I actually used for the book. It was a different process for me, but I liked it.

If the abortion issue is important to me, this is how you tackle that issue.

If you buy the website, maybe you'll do something with it. But so far I haven't; we'll see.

There are about 360,000 churches in America, so we could mentor a million kids within a short period of time if everyone signed on, which, of course, is a pipedream, but we're going to reach toward that.

I didn't know how story worked. So, when writing the screenplay, people introduced me to the science of it. And I'm grateful. I'll probably use that information for the rest of my career, in terms of writing novels or writing stories. And then, of course, to help me live a better story, a more meaningful story

If a piece of genius comes, it comes, and it if doesn't, it doesn't.

I have friends who are writers, but we don't tend to talk about literature very much. It's just not part of my process; I tend to be pretty secretive about what I'm working on.

It's something you can actually control. With writing, it feels like it's given to you, and when the good stuff hits, it feels like it's coming from some other planet.And you're just channeling it.

I think writers can get a little melodramatic sometimes about their work, and it helps me not to do that, to just say, "Well, this is how I make a living, and I need to become a very good craftsman."

It's possible to do both as a writer - to engage and have a family and all that good stuff - and I chose not to for the sake of the career.

I am a person of faith, so I come from a community that's involved in 360,000 churches across the country, that is an institution that could, in a relatively short period of time, provide hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of positive male role models.

Half the time I don't know what I'm trying to say.

Before I studied story, I was trying to write a novel, and it was terrible. It wasn't going anywhere, and I couldn't figure out what I was trying to do. It was really hard; much harder than I thought it was going to be. Now that I've studied story, I think I'd have a different approach and maybe I could actually get it done.

When you write, you're alone in a room. And when someone reads a book, they're alone in a room, too, usually. It's a really intimate exchange. And so people ask me where I get the boldness to talk about this or that, but I didn't feel like it required any sort of courage, because I was alone. Sometimes it feels weird for people to read it.

All my books have been titled based on a piece of the prose from inside the book.

There's a lot of letters, and a lot of people come say "hi" at book signings, but I'm amazed at how normal everybody is.

You're always weighing whether you should be that accessible or not, but my personality is naturally just to throw it all out there, so I'm much more comfortable with doing thatmy personality is naturally just to throw it all out there, so I'm much more comfortable with doing that.

I had some friends commenting me books, but mostly it was people I didn't know. But they're fans. They're fans of the books, so they have a working knowledge of how I write, and they know what they like and what they don't like. I'm really grateful for their feedback.

I posted the first three chapters and I had enough people say that chapter two was dragging that I cut it out just before the book went to press. And I'm glad I did. The book is a lot better without it.

I don't read a lot of inspirational books for life. But for writing, I think the two best books are The War of Art and William Zinsser's On Writing Well. I read a lot of classics;

Half the time I pick up a book, that's what I'm trying to get.

The economy is turning around, so that's going to help a little bit.

When we talk about the decline of the American family, I think we have to go back to the Industrial Revolution.

It blew my mind that what I was thinking was actually applicable to people's lives, and it certainly revolutionized family.

The sexual conquest is huge with men in terms of affirming themselves and their feelings of masculinity. That's a misguided kind of affirmation. That is not helpful, but that stuff happens.

I think we can provide better stories through providing mentors, and certainly part of my story is providing mentors to kids growing up without dads. I think positive male role models go a long way in terms of rescuing kids from a life of trouble.I think positive male role models go a long way in terms of rescuing kids from a life of trouble.

My Sunday school teachers had turned Bible narrative into children's fables. They talked about Noah and the ark because the story had animals in it. They failed to mention that this was when God massacred all of humanity.

And through a dark night of the soul, I came to realize that salvation happens through a mysterious, indefinable, relational interaction with Jesus in which we become one with Him. I realized Christian conversion worked more like falling in love than understanding a series of concepts of ideas. This is not to say there are no true ideas, it is only to say there is something else, something beyond.

Robert McKee says humans naturally seek comfort and stability. Without an inciting incident that disrupts their comfort, they won’t enter into a story. They have to get fired from their job or be forced to sign up for a marathon. A ring has to be purchased. A home has to be sold. The character has to jump into the story, into the discomfort and the fear, otherwise the story will never happen.

But playing your music as loud as you want and coming home drunk aren't real life. Real life, it turns out, is diapers and lawnmowers, decks that need painting, a wife that needs to be listened to, kids that need to be taught right from wrong, a checkbook, an oil change, a sunset behind a mountain, laughter at a kitchen table, too much wine, a chipped tooth, and a screaming child.

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.

Everybody wants to be somebody fancy. Even if they're shy.

The truth is there are a million steps, and we don't even know what the steps are, and worse, at any given moment we may not be willing or even able to take them; and still worse, they are different for you and they are always changing. I have come to believe the sooner we will fall in love with the God who keeps shaking things up, keeps changing the path, keeps rocking the boat to test our faith in Him, teaching us to not rely on easy answers, bullet points, magic mantras, or genies in lamps, but rather in His guidance, His existence, His mercy, and His love.

At the end of the day, when I am lying in bed and I know the chances of any of our theology being exactly right are a million to one, I need to know that God has things figured out, that if my math is wrong we are still going to be okay. And wonder is that feeling we get when we let go of our silly answers, our mapped out rules that we want God to follow. I don't think there is any better worship than wonder.

Nobody will listen to you unless they sense that you like them.

Today I wonder why it is God refers to Himself as 'Father' at all. This, to me, in light of the earthly representation of the role, seems a marketing mistake.

The heart responds to the conflict within a story.

More than my questions about the efficacy of social actions were my questions about my own motives. Do i want social justice for the oppressed or do i jusy want to be known as a socially active person? I spend 95 percent of my time thinking about myself anyway. I dont have to watch the evening news to see the world is bad, i only have to look at myself. I am not brow beating here, i am only saying that true charge , true living giving, God honoring change would have to start with the individual. I was the very problem i had been protesting. I wanted to make a sign that read “I am the problem

I think that every living person, every person who is awake to the functioning principles within his reality has a moment where he stops blaming the problems in the world on group thinking, on humanity and authority, and starts to face himself. I hate this more than anything. This is the hardest principle within christian spirituality for me to deal with. The problem is not out there, the problem is the needy beast of a thing living in my chest.

Some people skip through life. Others are dragged through it. I sometimes wonder if we are moving through time, or whether time is moving through us. Light, unlike anything else in the universe is not effected by time. Light exists outside of time.. It is still a mystery to physicists.

THINGS JESUS NEVER SAID: "You should come with me to church.

The thing I loved about her was that I never felt like she was selling anything. She would talk to God as if she knew Him, as if she had talked to Him on the phone that day. She was never ashamed which is the thing with some Christians I had encountered.

The trouble with deep belief is that it costs something And there is something inside me, some selfish beast of a subtle thing that doesn't like the truth at all because it carries responsibility, and if I actually believe these things I have to do something about them. It is so, so cumbersome to believe anything. And it isn't cool.

If we hear, in our inner ear, a voice saying we are failures, we are losers, we will never amount to anything, this is the voice of Satan trying to convince the bride that the groom does not love her. This is not the voice of God. God woos us with kindness. He changes out of character with the passion of his love.

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.

It's funny how you can't ask difficult questions in a familiar place, how you have to stand back a few feet and see things in a new way before you realize nothing that is happening to you is normal. The trouble with you and me is we are used to what is happening to us. We grew into our lives like a kernel beneath the earth, never able to process the enigma of our composition...Nothing is normal. It is all rather odd, isn't it, our eyes in our heads, our hands with five fingers, the capacity to understand beauty, to feel love, to feel pain.

Book of Ecclesiastes, God is saying... Write a good story, take somebody with you and let me help

I think life is staggering and we're just too used to it.

For me, the beginning of sharing my faith with people began by throwing out Christianity and embracing Christian spirituality, a nonpolitical mysterious system that can be experienced but not explained.

Do I still think there will be a day when all the wrongs are made right, when our souls find the completion they are looking for? I do. But when all things are made right, it won’t be because of some preacher or snake-oil salesman or politician or writer making promises in his book. I think, instead, this will be done by Jesus. And it will be at a wedding. And there will be a feast.

We shouldn’t be afraid to embrace whimsy, that nagging idea that life could be magical; it could be special if we were only willing to take a few risks.

The greatest stories go to those who don’t give in to fear.

I used love like money, but love doesn't work like money. It is not a commodity. When we barter with it, we all lose. When the church does not love it's enemies, it fuels their rage. It makes them hate us more.

Flattery has a short battery life, but reminding people they are amazing and precious and wanted and works of art can truly change their lives.

I stay away from churches in which I feel like I have to pretend I'm a better person than I am. That sort of thing moves my faith backwards.

In the age of information, ignorance is a choice.

You cannot be a Christian without being a mystic

I kept imagining these people, just living their daily lives, and then having them suddenly ended in unjust tragedy. When we watch the news, we grieve all of this, but when we go to the movies, we want more of it. Somehow we realize that great stories are told in conflict, but we are unwilling to embrace the potential greatness of the story we are actually in. We think God is unjust, rather than a master storyteller.

I love to give to charity, but I don't want to be charity. This is why I have so much trouble with grace.

The real voice is stiller and smaller and seems to know, without confusion, the difference between right and wrong and the subtle delineation between the beautiful and profane. It's not an agitated voice, but ever patient as though it approves a million false starts. The voice I am talking about is a deep water of calming wisdom.

...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.

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.

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.

There are two types of men in this world--one is looking for a woman to make his life complete and the other is looking for a woman to join his complete life.

If I use the Bible to prove I am right, I have yet to be humbled by the beautiful truths of the Bible.

Being a Christian is more like falling in love than understanding a series of ideas.

The early bird catches the worm. But I have never been one for worms. I am not sure what the late bird catches but I will feast with him today. Probably porridge.

Sometimes the story we're telling the world isn't half as endearing as the one that lives inside us.

We live in a world where bad stories are told, stories that teach us life doesn't mean anything and that humanity has no great purpose. It's a good calling, then, to speak a better story. How brightly a better story shines. How easily the world looks to it in wonder. How grateful we are to hear these stories, and how happy it makes us to repeat them.

Moral #1: "If you work hard, stay focused, and never give up, you will eventually get what you want in life." Moral #2: Sometimes the things we want most in life are the things that will kill us.

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.

Truth grew in my mind like a fungus, and though I tried to sleep it out, there was no resisting the epiphanies.

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.