Donald Miller Quotes - Page 7

I'm just trying to make the point that the story we're telling ourselves is often very different from the story we're telling the people around us.

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.

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.

The most attractive characteristic in a person is the story they are telling the world. We stop and stare at stories.

Good writers show rather than tell. Stories are told in action. Life stories are no different.

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.

I fell in love with books. Some people find beauty in music, some in painting, some in landscape, but I find it in words. By beauty, I mean the feeling you have suddenly glimpsed another world, or looked into a portal that reveals a kind of magic or romance out of which the world has been constructed, a feeling there is something more than the mundane, and a reason for our plodding.

I know our culture will sometimes understand a love for Jesus as weakness. There is this lie floating around that says I am supposed to be able to do life alone, without any help, without stopping to worship something bigger than myself. But I actually believe there is something bigger than me, and I need for there to be something bigger than me. I need someone to put awe inside me; I need to come second to someone who has everything figured out.

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.

Passion about nothing is like pouring gasoline in a car without wheels. It isn't going to lead anybody anywhere.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

I'm amazed at how much my writing is improved when I step away from the computer, even in small amounts. If I'm stuck, I vacuum the living room or walk the dog. I'm amazed at what comes out of that... We have to realize that part of the writing life where we're sitting down at the computer is harvesting the crops, but you have to have planted them and watered them and created fertile soil - and that's a life.