Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
28 quotes
"Fear is a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life."
Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
"The reason stories have dramatic tension is because LIFE has dramatic tension."
Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
"To know there is a better story for your life and to choose something other is like choosing to die."
Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
"Every creative person, and I think probably every other person, faces resistance when they are trying to create something good...The harder the resistance, the more important the task must be."
Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
"He captures memories because if he forgets them, it's as though they didn't happen."
Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
"The human body essentially recreates itself every six months. Nearly every cell of hair and skin and bone dies and another is directed to its former place. You are not who you were last November."
Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
"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, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
"God allows us to face the tension whether we like it or not."
Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
"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, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
"Life isn't memorable enough to remember everything. It's not like there are explosions all the time, or dog smoking cigarettes."
Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
"When you live countless stories in which you play a sedentary role, it's an odd feeling to switch stories."
Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
"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, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
"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, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
"The mountains themselves call us into greater stories."
Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
"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, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
"You don't realize your story is changing you until you look back."
Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
"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, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
"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, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
"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, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
"...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, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
"We were made to be distracted by life, by story."
Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
"It wasn't necessary to win for the story to be great, it was only necessary to sacrifice everything."
Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
"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, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
"The same principles that make up a good story also make up a good life."
Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
"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, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life