quotes by Donald Miller

"There is something beautiful about a billion stars held steady by a God who knows what He is doing. (They hang there, the stars, like notes on a page of music, free-form verse, silent mysteries swirling in the blue like jazz.) And as I lay there, it occurred to me that God is up there somewhere. Of course, I had always known He was, but this time I felt it, I realized it, the way a person realizes they are hungry or thirsty. The knowledge of God seeped out of my brain and into my heart. I imagined Him looking down on this earth, half angry because His beloved mankind had cheated on Him, had committed adultery, and yet hopelessly in love with her, drunk with love for her."
— Donald Miller

"It occurs to me it is not so much the aim of the devil to lure me with evil as it is to preoccupy me with the meaningless. "
— Donald Miller

"...sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself..."
— Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality)

"Believing in God is as much like falling in love as it is making a decision. Love is both something that happens to you and something you decide upon."
— Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality)

""Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons.""
— Donald Miller (Through Painted Deserts)

"It is always the simple things that change our lives. And these things never happen when you are looking for them to happen. Life will reveal answers at the pace life wishes to do so. You feel like running, but life is on a stroll. This is how God does things"
— Donald Miller

"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. "
— Donald Miller

"And if these mountains had eyes, they would wake to find two strangers in their fences, standing in admiration as a breathing red pours its tinge upon earth's shore. These mountains, which have seen untold sunrises, long to thunder praise but stand reverent, silent so that man's weak praise should be given God's attention."
— Donald Miller (Through Painted Deserts: Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road)

""No, life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath... We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn't it?" -Donald Miller,Through Painted Deserts"
— Donald Miller

"I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.

After that I liked jazz music.

Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.

I used to not like God because God didn't resolve. But that was before any of this happened."
— Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality)

""I can no more understand the totality of God than the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me""
— Donald Miller

"I once listened to an Indian on television say that God was in the wind and the water, and I wondered at how beautiful that was because it meant you could swim in Him or have Him brush your face in a breeze."
— Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality)

" I will give you this, my love, and I will not bargain or barter any longer. I will love you, as sure as He has loved me. I will discover what I can discover and though you remain a mystery, save God's own knowledge, what I disclose of you I will keep in the warmest chamber of my heart, the very chamber where God has stowed Himself in me. And I will do this to my death, and to death it may bring me.
I will love you like God, because of God, mighted by the power of God. I will stop expecting your love, demanding you 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 (Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality)

"I always thought the Bible was more of a salad thing, you know, but it isn't. It's a chocolate thing."
— Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality)

"Writers don't make any money at all. We make about a dollar. It is terrible. But then again we don't work either. We sit around in our underwear until noon then go downstairs and make coffee, fry some eggs, read the paper, read part of a book, smell the book, wonder if perhaps we ourselves should work on our book, smell the book again, throw the book across the room because we are quite jealous that any other person wrote a book, feel terribly guilty about throwing the schmuck's book across the room because we secretly wonder if God in heaven noticed our evil jealousy, or worse, our laziness. We then lie across the couch facedown and mumble to God to forgive us because we are secretly afraid He is going to dry up all our words because we envied another man's stupid words. And for this, as I said, we are paid a dollar. We are worth so much more."
— Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality)

"Dying for something is easy because it is associated with glory. Living for something is the hard thing. Living for something extends beyond fashion, glory, or recognition. We live for what we believe."
— Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality)

"Imagine, a Being with a mind as great as God's, with feet like trees and a voice like rushing wind, telling you that you are His cherished creation."
— Donald Miller

"You never question the truth of something until you have to explain it to a skeptic."
— Donald Miller

"And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn't it?

It might be time for you to go. It might be time to change, to shine out.

I want to repeat one word for you:
Leave.

Roll the word around on your tongue for a bit. It is a beautiful word, isn't it? So strong and forceful, the way you have always wanted to be. And you will not be alone. You have never been alone. Don't worry. Everything will still be here when you get back. It is you who will have changed."
— Donald Miller (Through Painted Deserts: Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road)

""I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made fo figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently.""
— Donald Miller (Through Painted Deserts: Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road)

"I do not believe a person can take two issues from Scripture, those being abortion and gay marriage, and adhere to them as sins, then neglect much of the rest and call himself a fundamentalist or even a conservative. The person who believes the sum of his morality involves gay marriage and abortion alone, and neglects health care and world trade and the environment and loving his neighbor and feeding the poor is, by definition, a theological liberal, because he takes what he wants from Scripture and ignores the rest."
— Donald Miller (Searching for God Knows What)

"I'll tell you how the sun rose
A ribbon at a time...

It's a living book, this life; it folds out in a million settings, cast with a billion beautiful characters, and it is almost over for you. It doesn't matter how old you are; it is coming to a close quickly, and soon the credits will roll and all your friends will fold out of your funeral and drive back to their homes in cold and still and silence. And they will make a fire and pour some wine and think about how you once were . . . and feel a kind of sickness at the idea you never again will be.

So soon you will be in that part of the book where you are holding the bulk of the pages in your left hand, and only a thin wisp of the story in your right. You will know by the page count, not by the narrative, that the Author is wrapping things up. You begin to mourn its ending, and want to pace yourself slowly toward its closure, knowing the last lines will speak of something beautiful, of the end of something long and earned, and you hope the thing closes out like last breaths, like whispers about how much and who the characters have come to love, and how authentic the sentiments feel when they have earned a hundred pages of qualification.

And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you, about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn't it?"
— Donald Miller (Through Painted Deserts: Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road)

"I can't do it. It would be like, say, trying to fall in love with somebody, or trying to convince yourself that your favorite food is pancakes. You don't decide those things, they just happen to you. If God is real, He needs to happen to me."
— Donald Miller

""I could not have known then that everybody, every person, has to leave, has to change like seasons; they have to or they die. The seasons remind me that I must keep changing.""
— Donald Miller (Through Painted Deserts: Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road)

"I am something of a recluse by nature. I am that cordless screwdriver that has to charge for twenty hours to earn ten minutes use. I need that much downtime. "
— Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality)

" I used to get really ticked about preachers who talked too much about grace, because they tempted me to not be disciplined. I figured what people needed was a kick in the butt, and if I failed at godliness it was because those around me weren’t trying hard enough."
— Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality)

"When you live on your own for a long time, however, your personality changes because you go so much into yourself you lose the ability to be social, to understand what is and isn't normal behavior. There is an entire world inside yourself, and if you let yourself, you can get so deep inside it you will forget the way to the surface. Other people keep our souls alive, just like food and water does with our body."
— Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality)

"When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are."
— Donald Miller (A Million Miles In A Thousand Years: Why Some Live Make Sense And Others Don't)

"Even our beliefs have become trend statements. We don’t even believe things because we believe them anymore. We only believe things because they are cool things to believe."
— Donald Miller

"I think this is when most people give up on their stories. They come out of college wanting to change the world, wanting to get married, wanting to have kids and change the way people buy office supplies. But they get into the middle and discover it was harder than they thought. They can't see the distant shore anymore, and they wonder if their paddling is moving them forward. None of the trees behind them are getting smaller and none of the trees ahead are getting bigger. They take it out on their spouses, and they go looking for an easier story."
— Donald Miller (A Million Miles In A Thousand Years: Why Some Live Make Sense And Others Don't)

"Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way."
— Donald Miller

"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 reson for our plodding."
— Donald Miller (To Own a Dragon: Reflections On Growing Up Without A Father)

"It was a haunting feeling, the sort of sensation you get when you wonder whether you are two people, the other of which does things you can't explain, bad and terrible things."
— Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality)

"We live on top of the created world, I think to myself, not in it."
— Donald Miller (Through Painted Deserts: Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road)

"I believe the greatest trick of the devil is not to get us into some sort of evil but rather have us wasting time. This is why the devil tries so hard to get Christians to be religious. If he can sink a man's mind into habit, he will prevent his heart from engaging God. I was into habit."
— Donald Miller

"ALONE

One of my new housemates, Stacy, wants to write a story about an astronaut. In his story the astronaut is wearing a suit that keeps him alive by recycling his fluids. In the story the astronaut is working on a space station when an accident takes place, and he is cast into space to orbit the earth, to spend the rest of his life circling the globe. Stacy says this story is how he imagines hell, a place where a person is completely alone, without others and without God. After Stacy told me about his story, I kept seeing it in my mind. I thought about it before I went to sleep at night. I imagined myself looking out my little bubble helmet at blue earth, reaching toward it, closing it between my puffy white space-suit fingers, wondering if my friends were still there. In my imagination I would call to them, yell for them, but the sound would only come back loud within my helmet. Through the years my hair would grow long in my helmet and gather around my forehead and fall across my eyes. Because of my helmet I would not be able to touch my face with my hands to move my hair out of my eyes, so my view of earth, slowly, over the first two years, would dim to only a thin light through a curtain of thatch and beard.
I would lay there in bed thinking about Stacy's story, putting myself out there in the black. And there came a time, in space, when I could not tell whether I was awake or asleep. All my thoughts mingled together because I had no people to remind me what was real and what was not real. I would punch myself in the side to feel pain, and this way I could be relatively sure I was not dreaming. Within ten years I was beginning to breathe heavy through my hair and my beard as they were pressing tough against my face and had begun to curl into my mouth and up my nose. In space, I forgot that I was human. I did not know whether I was a ghost or an apparition or a demon thing.
After I thought about Stacy's story, I lay there in bed and wanted to be touched, wanted to be talked to. I had the terrifying thought that something like that might happen to me. I thought it was just a terrible story, a painful and ugly story. Stacy had delivered as accurate a description of a hell as could be calculated. And what is sad, what is very sad, is that we are proud people, and because we have sensitive egos and so many of us live our lives in front of our televisions, not having to deal with real people who might hurt us or offend us, we float along on our couches like astronauts moving aimlessly through the Milky Way, hardly interacting with other human beings at all.

Blue Like Jazz, 171"
— 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 (A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life)

"Of his new book, Don says: “It might be the greatest book ever written. I don’t think anybody is going to read a book again after they read my new one. I think God is proud of me. I am going to make a killing off this thing and I’m going to use the money to go to space.”"
— Donald Miller

"Even our beliefs have become trend statements. We don’t even believe things because we believe them anymore. We only believe things because they are cool things to believe."
— Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality)

"I know, from the three visits I made to him, the blended composite of love and fear that exists only in a boy's notion of his father."
— Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality)

"No, life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath... We get one story, you and I, and one story alone."
— Donald Miller

"I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.
"
— Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality)

"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)

"I 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 (A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life)

""The most difficult lie I have ever contended with is this: life is a story about me." "
— Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality)

"If the point of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation. If I got any comfort as I set out on my first story, it was that in nearly every story, the protagonist is transformed. He's a jerk at the beginning and nice at the end, or a coward at the beginning and brave at the end. If the character doesn't change, the story hasn't happened yet. And if story is derived from real life, if story is just condensed version of life then life itself may be designed to change us so that we evolve from one kind of person to another. "
— Donald Miller (A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life)

"..[My friend Marco said]. essentially, humans are alive for the purpose of journey, a kind of three-act structure. They are born and spend several years discovering themselves and the world, then plod through a long middle in which they are compelled to search for a mate and reproduce and also create stability out of natural instability and then they find themselves at an ending tha seems to be designed for reflection. At the end, their bodies are slower, they are not as easily distracted, they do less work, and they think and feel about a life lived rather than look forward to a life getting started. He didn't know what the point of the journey was, but he did believe we were designed to search for and find something. And he wondered out loud if the point wasn't the search but the transformation the search creates. ...[I wondered] that we were designed to live through something rather than to attain something, and the thing we were meant to live through was designed to change us. The point of a story is the character arc, the change."
— Donald Miller (A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life)

"*I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago...

*So soon you will be in that part of the book where you are holding the bulk of the pages in your left hand, and only a thin wisp of the story in your right.

*We get one story, you and I, and one story alone....It might be time for you to go. It might be time to change, to shine out.

"
— Donald Miller (Through Painted Deserts: Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road)

"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)

"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)